Cash Out has Travolta as this world-renown thief/bank robber, who finds out his girlfriend, Kristin Davis, was an undercover FBI agent, and she almost busts him on one of his jobs. He escapes to a nice place out in the woods to retire, but his younger brother, Lukas Haas, has a big bank score he wants Travolta in on. Even though he says no, he finds out Haas is still going through with it, and shows up to the bank just in time for things to go south, leading to an Inside Man-esque scenario. Luckily Kristin Davis is the negotiator--or unluckily for the hostages who were just planning to go to work that day or make a bank transaction, and now have Noel Gugliemi sticking a gun in their face and swearing at them. Hey, what's a little PTSD between friends, right? Will there be enough convoluted hackiness in the plot to get Travolta out of this situation?
You know it baby. Convoluted hackiness all day long. We got names, which helps, and a short runtime, which also helps; but the paint-by-numbers plot is actually too little for even this runtime--think more 45-minute episode of a syndicated TV show. There's also the matter of the fact that I'm supposed to be rooting for people who are treating innocent people this poorly. Usually in a film like this I can turn my brain off, but it was really off-putting, not any kind of Robin Hood or anything like that. And then there's Travolta. He's not like a De Niro or a Cage, where there's an Oscar in there; but also not Mel Gibson, where he's a next-level star who is only in this DTV schlock because he's a horrible racist/misogynist/anti-Semite; or Willis, who was a next-level star but had health issues. The movie needed Travolta to be like one of those four, but he's never really been that, which renders the whole thing unremarkable, unfortunately, even for free with a shorter runtime.
This is now five films for Travolta on the site, but only his third DTV flick--the others were Wild Card posts for Battlefield Earth and The Punisher--and in those other two DTV ones, we can see the phenomenon I spoke of above. The first of those was Killing Season with Robert De Niro, who, even though he was mailing it in so bad he couldn't even be bothered to put a stamp on the envelope, was De Niro enough that Travolta wanted to act opposite him, and created enough of a novelty effect; and then the second of those, Paradise City, where Willis was solid enough, plus we had a Stephen Dorff that we didn't have here helping to prop up the proceedings so Travolta could just relax and chew scenery. That's the Travolta we need, put him opposite someone slightly better than him, and let him dominate that space just below. What we need is a Face/Off 2 with him and Cage, directed by John Woo, throw it on one of the streamers like Hulu or Netflix, and let it rack up the views. Unfortunately we don't have that, but we have a lot more Travolta DTV stuff out there, so we'll see if we end up getting around to it.
Many people know Kristin Davis from Sex and the City, which I get, or her great appearance on Seinfeld, but for me it'll always be her run on Melrose Place. Our site doesn't have quite the same number of alumni from Melrose as we do from 90210--probably the one we've seen the most is Patrick Muldoon, who was great in Rage and Honor 2, but we also had Courtney Thorne-Smith in Side Out and Heather Locklear in Return of Swamp Thing, so we're not complete bereft of Melrose on here. After Melrose and the Seinfeld appearance, I think my next two favorites from Davis are the TV movies The Ultimate Lie, where she plays a call girl who mistakenly gets her dad as a client (Jay Harangue does a fantastic job giving it his treatment on his YouTube channel); and A Deadly Vision, where she plays a server ("waitress" back then) with psychic visions of a killer. This unfortunately doesn't reach those heights, but it could have, because she was great at the beginning as Travolta's girlfriend who ends up turning on him. From there it's blah negotiator stuff, that they try to dress up with banter between her and Travolta that falls flat too. I saw she had a film called Deadly Illusions with Dermot Mulroney and Greer Grammer that's on Netflix and looks like it has potential, but it also had a buck-54 runtime, which just sounds too onerous. Just give me a 90-minute remake of The Ultimate Lie with her playing the mom and Dermot Mulroney as the dad, and then any actress born in 1998 as the daughter. You'll have gold.
Getting back to the whole PTSD thing, it may sound like I'm being too sensitive, but this wasn't a fun robbery, we had Noel Gugliemi, who's made a career out of being scary, pointing a gun at people and yelling and swearing at them. There was nothing fun or nice about that, certainly not lovable rogue or anything like that. I think Emmett recognized that somewhat, because at the end they tacked on that Travolta wired a million dollars into each of their bank accounts for their trouble. It's an interesting conundrum, because it's easy to say "hell, I'd go through all that for a million dollars," but for the hostages, they don't know they're getting a million dollars, they're in a situation where they're being held at gunpoint by some angry, aggressive individuals. It's why when we have lovable roguish heroes who break the law, they don't do shit like that. They're nice, even fun, and the people being inconvenienced don't mind it because the roguish heroes are so charming. It's just more of the slap-dashery/convoluted hackiness we've grown to love and expect from these Randall Scandals, and to be fair, I think I would've forgiven it if the movie had been more exciting. That was the bigger offense, that they tried to stretch 45 minutes of material into 90 minutes of movie.
Finally, between this site, and my old "Matt, Movie Guy" Tumblr (which still exists, I just haven't updated it in forever), I've become obsessed with shot composition over the years for all my screen grabs. Recently I was on the LAMBcast to discuss the new Nosferatu, where I said some of the shot composition was so great, Wes Anderson would've had to leave the theater to have a cigarette, but that was probably more projection on my part, because I was marveling at all Tumblr post material Eggers was giving us. With that in mind, I present to you the lost opportunity above. You have this beautiful shot of Travolta looking at something--dog urinating on his outdoor potted plants? Bad Tik Tok video that makes no sense to him? Another script to a Randall Scandal movie? Either way, it looks great, especially centered in the frame like that with the wall in the background, except what the hell is that thing on the left there? It just borks up the whole thing! Come Randall Scandal, you're killing my perfect screen grab... or giving me material for a seventh paragraph, which I was really struggling for, so maybe it's not all bad.
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Hulu, which isn't bad, but this isn't exactly great either, which is too bad. What's good is the podcast episode Ty and I did on this one, number 180 in the archives. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts!
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24131288
And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!
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