ruce Willis turns 50 this month. And for a while there it looked like we'd seen the last of this action hero. Willis hung up his six-shooters four years ago, claiming he was "bored" with action movies and tired of "saving the world."

  But it seems this cinematic gunslinger's got an itchy trigger finger. And who can blame him after moonlighting in the likes
of The Whole Ten Yards, which saw his tough-guy hitman reduced to a bunny slipper-wearing Martha Stewart wannabe?
Willis has no fewer than three shoot 'em-ups in his sights, including this month's Hostage, based on the Robert Crais best-seller.

  Willis plays Jeff Talley, a hotshot LAPD hostage negotiator haunted by his failure to save a mother and child from a suicidal madman. Wanting to put the tragedy behind him, Talley exits L.A. for a no-profile gig as the police chief of

actors
Bruce Willis
Kevin Pollak
Ben Foster 

director
Florent Emilio Siri

outtake  
Willis's 16-year-old daughter, Rumer, plays his daughter in the film.  She was also in The Whole Nine Yards, as well as Striptease and Now and Then with her mother, Demi Moore.
a low-crime hamlet in northern California. But the peace doesn't last long when three delinquent teens break into the home of a wealthy accountant with mob connections and take the family hostage.

  Naturally, things go from bad to worse: the accountant's mob boss kidnaps Tally's wife and daughter. Turns out there's some incriminating evidence in the house and he wants it back. And in a page that seems right out of the first Die Hard, things escalate even further when the FBI shows up and tries to take over the hostage situation.

  The mayhem doesn't end there for Willis. He has said he wouldn't return to making action movies until "the genre reinvents itself," and his next film, Sin City, promises to do just that. Willis plays a hard-nosed ex-cop obsessed with Jessica Alba's stripper in the ultra-faithful adaptation of the classic noir graphic novel, right down to the black-and-white comic book-style framing. The film also stars Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Benicio Del Toro and Michael Madsen. It'll hit theaters next month.

  Finally, there's Willis's long-rumored return as everyone's favorite terrorist-killing urban cowboy, John McClane, in the oh-so-cleverly-titled Die Hard 4.0.

  "After I did the first Die Hard I said I'd never do another; same after I did the second one and the third," Willis says. "But people kept asking me about [a fourth film in the franchise]. People want to see it."

  The plan is to start filming later this year. "It's hard to do; the whole Die Hard trilogy so far has been based on some element of terrorism and it's difficult in today's world to do stories that fictionally portray terrorism," Willis says. "All I can say is that John McClane is retired. We're having a contest to come up with the ending. What can we do? Have two planets crash into each other? Juggle an asteroid maybe?"

  Of course, it'll be enough for action fans if the wisecracking Willis merely saves the day. Yippee-ki-yay!

- Barrett Hooper