Hello, and welcome to Part 4 of my exploration of the filmography of John Travolta! This week, we’re digging into the final batch of his high-profile Hollywood output, before he fully retreated into lower-budget thriller and direct-to-video obscurities. Let’s dive in…
Wild Hogs (2007): The cinematic equivalent of being trapped in an elevator full of flatulent men who can’t stop nudging you in the ribs and laughing every time they cut one loose. It tells the story of four lifelong pals — played by Travolta, Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy, and Tim Allen — who decide to deal with their collective midlife crisis by going on a long motorcycle trip. Hijinks ensue, and under the direction of Walt Becker, no gag is deemed too broad or condescendingly ham-fisted for usage. It’s a ceaseless parade of stale gay panic jokes, hacky midlife crisis humor, and strained slapstick, all delivered within an artlessly crass screenplay that just kinds of shoves the viewer from one comic setpiece to the next. Possibly the least fun I’ve had in this marathon.
Rating: 1/10
Hairspray (2007): The movie to stage musical to movie pipeline is a strangely common phenomenon — Little Shop of Horrors, The Color Purple, Mean Girls, The Producers, etc. — and the final stage of that journey often seems to have lost something in translation. As such, it’s a little surprising that Adam Shankman’s Hairspray is as worthy a movie as the gently subversive John Waters film it springs from, working all manner of slyly effective gags into its broad, candy-colored musical framework. The songs (by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman) are often genuinely catchy, and each member of the star-studded ensemble cast — Christopher Walken, Queen Latifah, James Marsden, Michelle Pfeiffer, Amanda Bynes, etc. — successfully hops on the film’s playful tonal wavelength, with newcomer Nikki Blonsky doing stellar work in the film’s lead role (unfortunately, she has yet to snag another part as prominent as this one). Travolta’s turn as the heavyset homemaker Edna Turnblad works better than you expect it to: despite his Doctor Evil-adjacent vocal choices, he finds the pathos within the character, and the performance feels genuinely affectionate rather than demeaning. The plot is pretty by-the-numbers, and the film loses a bit of its spark whenever it decides to become fully sincere, but this remains a decent time.
Rating: 7/10
The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009): Is it heresy to say that I think this movie, in its own way, is as good as the original? Probably. But every time I go back to this, I’m so impressed by how skillfully director Tony Scott manages to maintain visual and emotional clarity within the framework of the flashy, hyperactive directorial style that began to define his work in the 21st century. It’s one of his five collaborations with Denzel Washington, who does terrific work as the beleaguered railway employee tasked with negotiating with a terrorist (Travolta, relishing the opportunity to jump into full-tilt nutso mode). Washington often gets asked to play some version of confident swagger, and he’s great at that, but there’s something really potent about his more muted work here, particularly the way he conveys the way the character’s modest moral compromises are beginning to eat away at his conscience. The big action sequences and high-stakes negotiations are handled with considerable skill, but the little moments are just as strong: consider the scene where, as the film approaches its boiling point, Denzel quietly argues with his wife about whether he should pick up a gallon or half-gallon of milk from the store. Sneakily great filmmaking here.
Rating: 9/10
Old Dogs (2009): Travolta reteams with Wild Hogs auteur Walt Becker for another insufferable comedy, this time about two bachelors (Travolta and Robin Williams) who are tasked with keeping an eye on a pair of six-year-old twins while their mother spends two weeks in jail. The film began life as a raunchy R-rated comedy, and after poor testing screenings, was recut into a PG-rated family film (a sequence involving Travolta and Williams taking the wrong pills results in them smiling too much and getting dizzy during a business meeting, one can easily imagine what the pills did in the original cut). It’s clear that there was never a good movie here — Becker’s direction is as broad and clunky as it was on Wild Hogs (one gag involves a woman getting her fingers smashed by the trunk of a car, and then screaming for thirty seconds while “Big Girls Don’t Cry” blares on the soundtrack) — but this time, you’ve also got a movie that feels like it’s been run through the blender, with prominent continuity errors and unexplained narrative gaps. It’s slightly — SLIGHTLY — less annoying than Wild Hogs, mostly thanks to Williams sneaking in a few good lines and attempting to infuse this unsalvageable material with as much humanity as possible.
Rating: 2/10
From Paris with Love (2010): This Luc Besson-produced action movie gives Travolta his Al Pacino moment, letting him serve as the morally compromised mentor to a more straight-laced character played by an up-and-coming movie star (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, whose career was derailed shortly after this by a variety of personal problems). Unfortunately, the rogue CIA agent Travolta is playing here just isn’t much fun to spend time with, and Meyers’ sulky young idealist is even less interesting. The action scenes are flatly-staged, and the story’s collection of who’s-betraying-who twists never manage to generate much interest. At one point, Travolta makes a “Royale with Cheese” joke, because of course he does.
Rating: 3/10
Savages (2012): Oliver Stone’s violent cartel drama, based on the novel by Don Winslow, has a handful of interesting moments, and some memorably colorful supporting turns from Benecio Del Toro, Salma Hayek, Travolta (as a cheerfully corrupt DEA Agent), and Demian Bechir. Unfortunately, all of that stuff is mere window dressing for an extremely tedious story about three young lovers (Blake Lively, Taylor Kitsch, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who get in over their heads with a rough crowd. All three lead performances are flat and lifeless — at times it feels as if they’re all auditioning for a fragrance commercial — accentuated by some truly dire narration from Lively: “Just because I’m telling you this story doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end of it. This could all be pre-recorded and I could be talking to you from the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, it’s that kind of a story. Just because things got so out of control.” By the time the film’s clunky, multi-tiered ending arrives, we’re so weary of spending time with these characters that we’ve run out of all goodwill for the film’s brighter spots.
Rating: 4/10
Killing Season (2013): This small-scale thriller casts Travolta as a Serbian sniper engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse with an American military veteran played by Robert De Niro. They hunt each other, they capture each other, they torture each other (in pretty gruesome fashion, for a movie that is largely sort of low-key), and they have long conversations about war and ethics and unforgiveable sins and so on. The premise is sound enough, but the execution is clunky, lacking both visceral thrills and psychological insight. Travolta seems pretty committed here, doing his best with a shaky Serbian accent, but De Niro is very much in paycheck mode, and his lack of interest ends up reflecting ours.
Rating: 3/10
The Forger (2014): On one level, this is a middling indie crime drama about a criminal (Travolta) attempting to settle his debts to some bad people by forging a Monet painting. On another level, it’s a deeply personal movie for Travolta that occasionally produces moments of surprising emotional depth. Tye Sheridan plays Travolta’s son, a teenager attempting to make peace with his terminal cancer diagnosis, and both his father and grandfather (played by an Irish-accented Christopher Plummer, enlivening every scene he appears in) are attempting to do the same. Travolta lost his real-life teenage son a few years before the release of this movie, and the quiet scenes in which he explores that emotional space here have some real power (particularly the film’s last scene, which is allowed to be as unsatisfyingly bittersweet as life is). It’s not a good movie, exactly — too much of the meat of this thing is just too generic — but it has good moments, and at this stage of Travolta’s career, that counts as a win.
Rating: 5/10
Next time, we take the plunge into the final decade of Travolta’s career, full of straight-to-video endeavors and misguided passion projects.
Back at ya later
Final decade so far. ;)