John Travolta became enormous with Saturday Night Fever and Grease, and the dancing is the key to everything: he moves like someone aware of exactly where his weight is, which reads on screen even when he is standing still.
The career collapsed in the 1980s, revived spectacularly with Pulp Fiction, produced a run of leads through the 1990s, and then declined again into direct-to-video work.
Pulp Fiction is the performance. Vincent Vega is slow, unbothered and slightly stupid, and the dance sequence exists because Tarantino knew what he had.
Face/Off and Get Shorty are the other two worth arguing for, and Scientology has been a defining and heavily reported part of his public life.
Didi ConnGrease (1978) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A six million dollar musical that took close to four hundred million and never stopped playing. The songs are permanent, the leads are twenty-nine and twenty-three playing seventeen, and…
Amy IrvingBrian De Palma's 1976 King adaptation. Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, John Travolta supporting.
Bruce WillisDiminishing returns on the talking-baby concept. Travolta and Alley return as James and Mollie, now married with a toddler Mikey and a baby Julie.
Bruce Willis1989 Amy Heckerling comedy with John Travolta and Kirstie Alley. Bruce Willis voices a sarcastic infant narrator.
Danny DeVito1995 Barry Sonnenfeld crime comedy adapting Elmore Leonard. Travolta as Miami loan shark who becomes a Hollywood producer.
Christian Slater1996 John Woo action with Travolta as rogue Air Force pilot who steals nuclear weapons. The film depicts Air Force pilot Vic Deakins who hijacks nuclear weapons during a stealth bomber training flight.
Abigail SpencerThe Forger is Philip Martin's 2014 American crime drama. The work struggles between dramatic family content and the art forgery procedural that the title promises.
Alessandro Nivola1997 John Woo action with Travolta and Nicolas Cage swapping faces as cop and terrorist. Face/Off is John Woo's 1997 American action film and one of the principal entries in both Woo's filmography and the broader 1990s American action canon.
Connie NielsenRashomon-style investigation of a Panama training accident. Basic is John McTiernan's 2003 American military thriller.
John Travolta2018 Kevin Connolly biopic with Travolta as Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. Notorious zero-percent Rotten Tomatoes score.
Devon Sawa2015 David Hackl drama with Cage as a Texas power lineman raising his niece while battling storms and corporate negligence. Life on the Line is David Hackl's 2015 American drama.
John Travolta2024 Ives action with Travolta as a master thief in a botched bank heist. Direct-to-streaming late-career programmer.
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