"Water's wet. The sky is blue. Women have secrets. Who gives a fuck? You want a beer?"A truly iconic Bruce Willis performance, a deep love of nasty violence, and some of the most elegantly smarmy dialogue ever make this, in its nihilistic way, one of the most insidiously entertaining (to me anyways) pieces of cinematic misogyny ever. The women are objects in the background, vague symbols of virtue to be earned while the film goes about almost casually dismantling the macho assholes at its mean little core in order to rebuild their "chivalry" a bullet at a time. Their stupid little rituals take a few of those shots too: right from the start a "great night for football" is a bloody rain-soaked mess, literally a drowning symbol of masculinity. And yet it practically insists that being a washed up shitbag has its own intrinsic cool...being an old-fashioned relic isn't glamorous but, as Joe Hallenbeck says when threatening his wife with a gun, "The truth is a beautiful thing." Later she literally begs him to spit in her face, as far as she's concerned as good a declaration of love as she's come to expect. As callously tacky as a $650 pair of leather pants without a TV in them, or a reindeer goat cheese pizza, but also deeply conservative. Joe triumphs over the world's moral collapse through sheer stubborn insistence that he knows best.
