Total Recall: John Travolta's Best Movies
We run down the best-reviewed work of the Old Dogs star.
5. Saturday Night Fever
A movie so successful it single-handedly jump-started the white leisure suit industry, the Bee Gees' chart dominance of the late 1970s, and John Travolta's acting career, Saturday Night Fever had humble origins (it was inspired by a New York magazine story later discovered to have been fabricated) and a plot that came in second (or third) to its soundtrack. But hey, it was a pretty spectacular soundtrack -- and Fever also boasted a hungry, nuanced performance from Travolta, who embodied the desperation of Brooklyn dreamer Tony Manero with so much raw talent that he hardly seemed like the same guy starring as goofball Vinnie Barbarino in Welcome Back, Kotter. Saturday Night Fever was a huge commercial sensation, but it was also a dance movie with a yearning, wounded heart, and Travolta's star turn was recognized by critics like Janet Maslin of the New York Times, who effused, "Mr. Travolta is deft and vibrant, and he never condescends to the character, not even in a scene that has Tony and Stephanie arguing about whose Romeo and Juliet it is, Zeffirelli's or Shakespeare's."
4. Carrie
Before Brian De Palma gave John Travolta one of the meatiest roles of his career in Blow Out, he reached out and gave the young actor his first big break as one of Sissy Spacek's teen tormentors in the big-screen adaptation of Stephen King's first hit novel. It's fashionable to dump on King's work, and you might not expect any movie whose climax hinges on a strategically placed bucket of pig blood to find much purchase with serious film critics, but Carrie is not only one of the earliest high school horror movies, it's one of the best. Anchored by a typically powerful performance from Sissy Spacek (not to mention Piper Laurie as her psychotic mother), Carrie drew praise from most critics -- including Roger Ebert, who called it "an absolutely spellbinding horror movie, with a shock at the end that's the best thing along those lines since the shark leaped aboard in Jaws."
3. Hairspray
Taking the musical stage adaptation of a John Waters movie and turning it back into a film doesn't seem like the most intelligent way to score a hit movie, but when you're armed with John Travolta in a fat suit -- as a woman -- anything can happen. In the case of 2007's Hairspray, "anything" included a $200 million-plus gross, a Golden Globe nomination for Travolta, and critical praise from scribes like Heather Huntington of ReelzChannel.com, who wrote, "I will confess that Travolta totally turned me around. A mountain of a woman in his female fat suit, he commits 150% to the role." As Edna, the strict, reclusive mother of Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky), Travolta not only partially repented for his involvement in Wild Hogs earlier in the year, he made Christopher Walken seem like a believable suburban middle-class dad. Yes, Hairspray has some important things to say about race relations in the early '60s (and by extension, today) -- but even without its trenchant subtext, it succeeds as an eminently likable film. In the words of DVDTown's John J. Puccio, "How can you not like a movie in which John Travolta and Christopher Walken sing a love song to each other?"
2. Face/Off
There's something to be said for an actor who knows who to deliver a quietly understated performance. There's also something to be said for chomping down on the scenery and gnawing it until there's nothing left, which is exactly what Travolta and Nicolas Cage got to do in John Woo's Face/Off -- and they got to pretend to be each other in the bargain, thanks to a delightfully absurd script involving terrorism, face transplants, and doves. Woo's had a bumpy time in Hollywood, to say the least, but Paramount gave him complete control over Face/Off, and his untrammelled vision shines in an action thriller that manages to be both over-the-top ridiculous and filled to the brim with laughs, brilliant set pieces, and white-knuckle entertainment. Salon's Stephanie Zacharek summed up the movie's unlikely charm when she wrote, "Florid, passionate, frequently hilarious and loaded with messy emotions that nobody in his or her right mind should even attempt to explain, it's operatic in its nutball intensity."
1. Pulp Fiction
A lot of people loved Pulp Fiction in 1994, but it's hard to imagine that any of them loved it more than John Travolta. Consider, if you will, that the future Vincent Vega was limping his way through Look Who's Talking Now just the year before Fiction came out -- and making a cameo as himself in the alleged comedy Boris and Natasha: The Movie the year before that. It had been a very long time since most people had thought of Travolta as a real actor -- but it had been even longer since anyone as talented as Quentin Tarantino had availed themselves of Travolta's long-slumbering talent. Here, armed with a classic Tarantino script, surrounded by a talented cast, and exhibiting a new level of physical presence, Travolta was one of Pulp Fiction's many revelations, and he justifiably used his work here as a launchpad for one of the most unlikely second acts in Hollywood history. "It's the movie equivalent," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, "of that rare sort of novel where you find yourself checking to see how many pages are left and hoping there are more, not fewer."
In case you were wondering, here are Travolta's top ten movies according RT users' scores:
1. Pulp Fiction -- 96%
2. Bolt -- 89%
3. Hairspray -- 88%
4. Carrie -- 87%
5. Saturday Night Fever -- 82%
6. Get Shorty -- 81%
7. Blow Out -- 81%
8. Grease -- 79%
9. A Love Song for Bobby Long -- 78%
10. Face/Off -- 78%
Take a look through Travolta's complete filmography, as well as the rest of our Total Recall archives. And don't forget to check out the reviews for Old Dogs.
Finally, here's Travolta as a teenager in a commercial for Honda motorcycles:
August M. on 11-23-2009 04:33 PM
Bolt and Pulp Fiction are the only ones I enjoy on this list.