At long last, the time has come to conclude my journey through the filmography of John Travolta. If you missed the earlier entries, here are links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
The current era is, to put it mildly, the roughest stretch of his career (he’s hit an even lower point than the Look Who’s Talking treadmill that Tarantino rescued him from). But are there any buried treasures within this mix of tedious direct-to-video thrillers and misguided passion projects? Let’s dig in…
Life on the Line (2015): Every hurricane season, a lot of people are reminded to express their gratitude for the hard work that America’s power linemen do to keep the lights on across the country. The praise is well-deserved, to be sure, and this movie aims to do the same thing at feature length — essentially, to do for linemen what Ladder 49 did for firefighters. Like that movie, Life on the Line is earnest, good-hearted, and a little dull. Unlike that movie, it is also flat-out ridiculous. What begins as a sort of grounded look at a thankless and risky profession eventually morphs into a wildly overwrought drama in which guns are being waved around, a pregnant woman is at risk of losing her baby due to a power outage, and remarkably improbable forms of self-sacrifice are required. The finale is meant to be moving, and ends up feeling unintentionally funny. Travolta spent six weeks learning how to be a lineman in preparation for this movie, and seems committed to playing the part with conviction, but is regularly undone by flashback scenes in which he sports distracting beard dye and even more distracting hairstyles.
Rating: 3/10
Criminal Activities: You remember when the ‘90s produced that wave of mediocre Tarantino knockoffs? Stuff like Suicide Kings and Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead and 2 Days in the Valley? This feels like a knock-off version of those movies. It’s too bad, because you’ve got an incredible quartet of talented young actors at the film’s center (Christopher Abbott, Michael Pitt, Dan Stevens, and Rob Brown, all of whom have done excellent work elsewhere), none of whom are able to rise above the hacky script or plodding direction (the latter courtesy of Jackie Earl Haley, making his directorial debut and also playing a minor supporting role). Travolta turns up for a few scenes as the film’s main heavy, and he’s probably the best thing here because he’s aiming to be entertaining instead of realistic (an approach actors of his generation broadly seem more comfortable with, and something Travolta in particular seems extremely comfortable with). Even so, I was checking my watch early and often.
Rating: 2/10
In a Valley of Violence: Every Ti West movie is some form of affectionate pastiche (usually operating within some corner of the horror realm), and the effectiveness of the end result varies from project to project. This time, he’s trying his hand at a Sergio Leone-style western, and doing a pretty good job of it. Ethan Hawke plays a drifter who wanders into a small town run by a corrupt U.S. Marshal (Travolta), and ends up in conflict with the sheriff’s loathsome son (James Ransone). Travolta calmly but firmly tells Hawke to leave town, and Hawke obliges… but new complications arise, and the men find themselves locked in deadly conflict. It’s a pretty standard western plot, but what’s joyfully surprising is the way Travolta’s performance gradually shifts from relaxed pragmatism to comic despair as the situation spins out of control (watching him attempt to wrangle his incompetent henchmen is akin to watching a parent struggling to manage their toddlers). It’s some of the most genuinely funny work Travolta has done, and he gradually steals the movie as it barrels towards the bloody finish line. West helms the whole thing with confidence, Hawke plays his wounded character’s thirst for vengeance with compelling focus, and Jeff Grace’s Morricone-inspired score is a pleasure. Unfortunately, it never earned a chance to find an audience, being shipped off to VOD after an extremely limited theatrical release. As of the writing of this newsletter, it stands as the last legitimately good movie on Travolta’s resume.
Rating: 8/10
I Am Wrath (2016): Director Chuck Russell once helmed A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, one of the better films of that series. He made the remake of The Blob, which I thought was kinda fun, and he made The Mask, which other people seem to think is fun. He made The Scorpion King, which wasn’t great, but remains a more adequate star vehicle for The Rock than most of the stuff that The Rock has been making lately. However, whatever modest abilities Russell once had seem to have completely vanished here in this entirely routine, lifeless revenge thriller. Travolta plays a regular guy whose wife is murdered, and he decides to get revenge. He finds a Bible verse to help him justify this (Jeremiah 6:11, “I am filled with the wrath of The Lord, and I cannot hold it in,” insert theological rebuttals here), and starts torturing and killing his way to the final target. Christopher Meloni plays a buddy who helps him with this. Travolta utters the words “I am wrath” twice. Boring boring boring.
Rating: 1/10
Gotti (2018): Every time Martin Scorsese makes a new mob movie, somebody makes the claim that he’s glorifying gangsters, and we get to have a fresh round of conversation about media literacy. Well, he’s a movie that lives up to every erroneous charge that has ever been flung at Mr. Scorsese, hyping up Mr. Gotti as a cool guy who was railroaded by the system. Sure, he killed some people. He’s a gangster, that’s what gangsters do. But you know what else he did? He was nice to some old ladies crossing the street sometimes. Are the crooks on Wall Street helping old ladies cross the street? I don’t think so. This was a long-time passion project for Travolta, but under the direction of Entourage star Kevin Connolly, his work feels like an SNL parody of a mobster. Constant and clumsy cutting is paired with on-the-nose needledrops in a feverish attempt to give the film a sense of energy (including several courtesy of Pitbull, who supervised the soundtrack), and it kind of works, but that’s just about all it accomplishes. Key details are skimmed over so quickly that certain events become confusing, dramatic scenes of domestic drama are wildly overplayed, and the movie swipes moves from Goodfellas so constantly that you simply can’t stop wishing you were watching that instead. A hot mess.
Rating: 2/10
Speed Kills (2018): Here’s another movie that clearly loves Goodfellas, but this time it’s also a movie that loves speedboats. The film was originally designed as an interactive experience intended to help boost VR sales, but barely made a dent in that format. As such, the VR angle was hastily scrapped, and the film was reworked as a direct-to-video crime thriller. I wish I had seen it in VR, if only because the novelty of the format is the only thing even remotely interesting about the movie. An early scene that finds Travolta in a tense showdown with a clearly frail-looking Tom Sizemore is so clumsily acted that you might as well be watching a failed audition for a local community theatre production. Even the speedboat chases, which are designed as the film’s big selling point, fall completely flat in execution. Another terminally dull one.
Rating: 1/10
Trading Paint (2019): It’s a direct-to-video racing drama! Travolta plays a veteran dirt race legend who is now proudly competing alongside his son (Toby Sebastian). There’s some family drama, and some injuries, and a sleazy local businessman played by Michael Madsen (a seasoned veteran of cheap VOD movies at this stage of his career) who turns up to vaguely threaten somebody every so often. It’s better than Speed Kills, if only because it gives the actors a little space to just sort of explore their characters (Kevin Dunn has a nice monologue about fishing, Madsen hits a few surprisingly soulful notes in his mostly-surly performance, Travolta continues to give his all to yet another underwritten character). It’s formulaic in structure and pedestrian in execution, but it’s not completely unwatchable, I guess. Small mercies and all that.
Rating: 2/10
The Poison Rose (2019): This clunky neo-noir assembles a whole host of once-distinguished actors who seem to have fallen on hard times in recent years: Travolta, Morgan Freeman, Famke Janssen, Robert Patrick, Peter Stormare, and Brendan Fraser (who recently experienced his own Travolta-esque comeback with his Oscar win for The Whale) gather together to do their best with a third-rate version of Chinatown. John Travolta’s daughter Ella gets one of the film’s more dramatic roles, and her performance is… look, Travolta seems like a loving dad, and I guess it’s nice that he got his daughter a big part in a movie. Freeman plays the John Huston stand-in, and does reasonably well playing some gruffer notes than usual. Travolta tries his hand at world-weary, but it isn’t really his speed… he’s good too much weird energy beneath the surface to play a hard-boiled character. For the most part, this is another watch-checker, but the film springs to life every time Fraser appears. Playing an effete, flatulent villain with a thick southern drawl, Fraser gives what might fairly be described as a terrible performance, but his choices are so off-the-wall that you can’t take your eyes off him. In a movie as drab as this one, that makes him the MVP.
Rating: 2/10
The Fanatic (2019): This is a bad movie, but it’s not in the same category as the rest of these bad movies. The other bad Travolta movies of recent years are bad in generic ways; cheap impressions of better movies. This film, written and directed by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, is bad in a bold, singular, ambitious way. It tells the story of Moose (Travolta), an autistic autograph hound who is obsessed with an actor named Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa). When Moose finally meets Hunter, the encounter goes badly: Hunter is trying to deal with a personal problem, Moose’s inability to read social cues leads him to be unintentionally rude, and Hunter snaps at him. This sends Moose into a personal spiral, and his relationship with Hunter only grows more toxic with time. The movie’s King of Comedy-esque attempt to comment on the nature of fandom and fame is ungainly at best (consider the wince-inducing scene where Sawa pauses to marvel at what a cool band Limp Bizkit is) and startlingly ugly at worst (I’m not sure anyone involved with the film understands how autism works, or the sort of things it prompts people to do), but I found the film strangely gripping, and the reason for that is Travolta’s absolute commitment to playing this misbegotten character. In interviews, Travolta has indicated that he feels it’s some of his finest work (despite receiving near-universal scorn from critics), and you can see why: he’s displaying an extraordinary level of dedication here, and he makes a fairly ridiculous caricature of a character feel real through sheer force of will. It’s the tragedy of the actor’s career in microcosm: he often seems to put the most effort and skill into the projects that deserve it the least. If the final rating seems wishy-washy, it’s only because The Fanatic is both tremendous and terrible simultaneously.
Rating: 5/10
Paradise City (2022): Travolta re-teams with I Am Wrath helmer Chuck Russell for this one, and the results aren’t any better. This time, he’s joined by Bruce Willis, in one of the actor’s final roles. That’s a factor that makes the movie sad on top of being tedious, as Willis seems almost entirely checked-out here (playing a grizzled bounty hunter who goes missing), no doubt a result of the aphasia that afflicted him in the later years of his career. Blake Jenner plays the lead character — the bounty hunter’s wide-eyed son — and Travolta is the villain, hitting the usual Travolta villain notes. It’s funny… you see Travolta acting in something like this, and he’s clearly putting in the same degree of effort as he was putting into playing the baddie in a movie like Broken Arrow. But Broken Arrow was directed by John Woo, and had music by Hans Zimmer, and had all the usual technical proficiency of a glossy Hollywood production. And in these VOD movies, all of that behind-the-camera competence just disappears. You get lousy editing, and bad ADR, and clumsy scoring, and amateur hour supporting performances, and all of this accumulates to make the hard work Travolta is still doing look worse than it is. Dismaying.
Rating: 1/10
Mob Land (2023): Most of the Travolta stuff in this period is a C-level riff on other, better movies - we have his Wal-Mart bin versions of Goodfellas, Chinatown, Death Wish, and so on. This one tries its hand at mimicking Hell or High Water, and surprisingly manages to approach B-level. Travolta takes on the Jeff Bridges role, naturally, playing a good-hearted Alabama sheriff who’s thrown in over his head when a troubled young man (Shiloh Fernandez) robs a local pill mill and ends up drawing the attention of a nasty mob enforcer (Stephen Dorff). Travolta’s solid here, but it’s Dorff who swipes the movie as the film’s oily hitman, making a meal of the Anton Chigurh-tinted scenes in which he weighs the fate of his targets. The writing is clunky, but Dorff brings so much relaxed charisma to the role that he makes it sing. The movie is too long and too generic to fully satisfy, but Dorff’s performance is a welcome and surprising example of a performer valiantly rising above the material.
Rating: 4/10
Cash Out (2024): Travolta’s most recent outing is, in a way, maybe his most depressing. The plotting and direction are no worse than several titles listed here, but it’s the only one in which Travolta himself seems to have fully, completely given up. Prior to this, in movie after movie, you see him working hard to bring something interesting to every part. Even when his choices are ill-advised, the commitment to his craft is evident: whatever the movie is doing, Travolta is trying his level best not to be boring. But in this film, playing a high-level thief, he’s just… there. He shows up and delivers his lines in a manner not dissimilar to Bruce Willis in any number of VOD thrillers. One can only speculate on the reason for this, but it’s disheartening to see. Even more dismaying: he’s currently filming Cash Out 2.
Rating: 1/10
My assumption, prior to jumping into this project, was that Travolta had hit the skids and simply wasn’t getting anything half-decent anymore because no one was offering him anything. But listening to a series of interviews with him from recent years suggests otherwise: Travolta appears to be very well-set financially due to a series of endorsement deals and other investments, and is only doing films that are either convenient enough to work into his schedule or that he is particularly compelled by (like, ah, Gotti and The Fanatic). He just seems to have genuinely terrible instincts when it comes to finding worthwhile projects. Things seem pretty bleak now, with no signs of recovery on the horizon, but you never know: Travolta has proven strangely resilient over the years, as he has a particular sort of screen energy that can’t quite be replicated, and it’s easy imagine the right director coming to his rescue once again at some point in the future. Probably not the director of Cash Out 2, though.
My friend David suggested that at the end of this, I might take a look at the average ratings of each period of Travolta’s career. So let’s do that! Here’s what I’ve got:
1975-1993: 5/10 - Some masterpieces in this stretch, and also some real duds. Clearly it evens out to a pretty neatly divided blend of good and bad.
1994-1999: 6.91/10 - The comeback era. Despite some missteps, this is the one chunk of Travolta’s career that tilts positive overall.
2000-2006: 3.7/10 - A swift, steep move downwards.
2007-2014: 4.25/10 - More of the same, basically… a couple of bright spots within another rough patch.
2015-2024: 2.75/10 - Oof.
And finally, having seen almost all of them (save for a small handful of films that were unavailable to watch at an affordable price), here are my picks for the top ten movies of John Travolta’s career:
1. Blow Out
2. The Thin Red Line
3. Carrie
4. Pulp Fiction
5. The Taking of Pelham 123
6. Saturday Night Fever
7. Face/Off
8. Primary Colors
9. In a Valley of Violence
10. Get Shorty
Rebekah and I both enjoyed going on this journey, despite its many bumps. It’s a fascinating thing, seeing the full arc of someone’s career. and following a short break, we may feel inclined to do something along these lines again. Maybe somebody with a better batting average, though. John Cazale? Anyway, thanks for reading!
Back at ya later