All 5 Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson Movies, Ranked

Image via 20th Century Fox Published Jul 20, 2026, 3:41 PM EDT Jeremy has more than 2600 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account Possibly thanks to them being prolific actors, more than anything else, Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson happen to have both appeared in a total of five movies. It would be dishonest to say they were in all those movies together, since Willis has a cameo in one, and then in another, both have sizable roles, but don’t really have any screen time together. As for the other three (one a Die Hard sequel, and the other two a pair of unconventional superhero movies), they're the stars of those, and have plenty of scenes together in the bunch of them. There are going to remain five going forward, too, since Willis retired from acting in 2022, though Jackson remains prolific. There’s a real range of quality here, and a few different genres represented, too, with the best of the Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson movies also being one of the greatest of all time, and two others arguably being classics within the genres they belong to. 5 'Loaded Weapon 1' (1993) Image via New Line Cinema Speaking ill of National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 might not be the wisest thing to do, but something has to go in this bottom spot, and it is probably the least memorable of all the movies that both Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis appear in. It’s also got very little Willis, since he’s here in a cameo role. So, maybe National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 should barely count, for present purposes, but you do have to acknowledge it, given that both actors who are relevant here are technically in it. And hey, Samuel L. Jackson happens to be in it quite a lot, as one of the main detectives who’s there, and paired with Emilio Estevez's character, to parody the buddy cop dynamic found in the similarly titled Lethal Weapon. It’s just a slog of a parody movie, and you should just watch (or rewatch) one of The Naked Gun flicks instead. Maybe one of the problems is that Lethal Weapon was already decently funny, as an action/comedy film, and so parodying it just feels like an inherently silly thing to do. A lot could be forgiven if Loaded Weapon 1 did manage to simply be funny, despite it having a kind of broken or futile set-up/premise, but… it’s not very funny. If it were funny, it would be above the second-last movie in this ranking, which also isn't particularly great. It’s just that one’s better than Loaded Weapon 1, which isn't saying much. Anyway, this movie tries to spoof a few more titles than just Lethal Weapon (including Die Hard, which is why Willis briefly appears as his character from that series, John McClane), but the jokes that aren’t Lethal Weapon-related rarely land, either. It’s just a slog of a parody movie, and you should just watch (or rewatch) one of The Naked Gun flicks instead, honestly. 4 'Glass' (2019) Image via Universal Pictures There is another M. Night Shyamalan movie with both Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson in it that’s a good deal better than Glass, and Glass is actually a sequel to that movie, but because Glass is the inferior movie, it has to be addressed first. Uh… okay. It’s also connected to Split, which was a movie about a man with dissociative identity disorder, but he goes through physical changes when he switches personalities, and he has many different personalities. Split was a secret sequel of sorts to Unbreakable, which, yeah, is going to be the movie that ranks ahead of Glass, because of course it does. But Willis’s superhuman character showed up at the very end of Split, as a bit of a Shyamalan twist (he does like doing them), and then Glass concluded what ended up being a trilogy. Seeing Willis’s and Jackson’s characters return and interact with James McAvoy’s is initially intriguing, and it feels like there are some cool places Glass could go once it gets these three unusual characters confined in the same psychiatric facility. Unfortunately, Glass doesn’t actually go to many of those places, and it seems keen to keep doing intentionally unsatisfying things. In that sense, it feels a bit like Joker: Folie à Deux, which is also a film that toys with your expectations and (perhaps willingly) disappoints more often than it excites or proves engaging. Glass really falls apart in its final act, and the way it wraps up makes Glass, as a whole, stand as a disappointing final act within the trilogy it belongs to. It just feels like such a waste of time, money, and talent, especially because it had all the ingredients to be something cool. It ends up being such a shrug of a movie. 3 'Unbreakable' (2000) Image via Buena Vista Pictures Distribution At least Unbreakable is good. Unbreakable being good is part of the reason why Glass not being very good felt so disappointing, sure, in the sense that the whole saga technically spanned almost 20 years. Also, Shyamalan has otherwise not seemed concerned with directing sequels or follow-up movies, but he did that here, and it’s a case of two out of three being not bad. Unbreakable is about a man who survives a train crash and realizes he might well have some kind of superhuman strength and potentially other abilities. He encounters another man who very much doesn’t have superhuman strength (more the opposite), and they develop a strange dynamic. It’s a forward-thinking and unusual superhero movie in the sense that there’s not a lot of action here, and it’s more of a psychological thriller/drama sort of thing that just so happens to involve, to some degree, at least one character with superhuman abilities. Unbreakable keeps things interesting with some plot twists and turns, a bit like you might've expected from Shyamalan one year on from The Sixth Sense… which also, of course, starred Bruce Willis, but no Samuel L. Jackson there. Both actors are really good in Unbreakable, and the movie as a whole still manages to stand out all these years later, even though now the 21st century has turned out to be one that (so far) is absolutely swamped with superhero-related movies. 2 'Die Hard with a Vengeance' (1995) Image via 20th Century Fox The first Die Hard is about as classic as action movies get, with Die Hard with a Vengeance – the third in the series overall – coming the closest to matching the quality of the first. Emphasis on “closest to,” as it’s not a classic in the same way that the original was, but it’s very good. It’s also linked to the first movie by having Jeremy Irons, as the antagonist, be the brother of Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), who was the antagonist in Die Hard (1988). Also, it had the same director as the first, John McTiernan. It loses the confined setting, though, and spreads out even more than Die Hard 2, which had a larger setting (an airport), but was still mostly confined to that area. In Die Hard with a Vengeance, the plot sees John McClane having to dart all over New York City. There are numerous explosives set around the place, and McClane’s tasked with carrying out a series of tasks for the villain who’s controlling him, in effect, and it turns out he’s doing so for vengeance. Samuel L. Jackson plays a shopkeeper who ends up providing assistance to McClane, and their dynamic goes a long way toward making the whole film entertaining. Also, Jeremy Irons, while not playing as iconic a character as Hans Gruber, still manages to do a lot with the villainous role he's given, and with him calling McClane a lot, you get to hear his voice a good deal of the time, which is always a plus, since few actors have ever sounded as good as Irons. Otherwise, what else do you want, and what else can be said? It’s a very good action movie, and a more-than-solid sequel overall to one of the most iconic films of the 1980s. 1 'Pulp Fiction' (1994) It would be hard to justify putting anything other than Pulp Fiction here. That being said, it has to be noted how Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson don’t really share the screen here. There are promo photos for Pulp Fiction that see Willis, Jackson, John Travolta, and Uma Thurman posing together, but most of Willis’s screen time has him separated from the others. He gets a couple of moments with Travolta’s character, none with Thurman’s, and technically one scene he’s in with Jackson, though that scene has Willis’s character interaction with Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), who then goes on to interact with Travolta’s Vincent Vega and Jackson’s Jules Winnfield. It’s only really Travolta and Willis who cross paths here, and then at one point later in the movie. But Pulp Fiction is amazing, and both Jackson and Willis get plenty of opportunities to shine, so even if they're not really in it “together” in the truest of senses, they're both great in the movie, and both can well and truly include Pulp Fiction among the best movies in either of their respective filmographies. It’s a movie with unmistakable style and fantastically written dialogue, with all of that stuff being praised to death, as is the unpredictability of the whole movie. Pulp Fiction remains close to a magnum opus, for Quentin Tarantino, and even with all the hype that’s surrounded the film for more than three decades now, it really does remain just that good.