Cash Out is John Travolta’s latest low-budget thriller and, the good news is, for a recent Travolta film, it’s pretty good, which is to damn with faint praise.
Travolta plays Mason Verger, a twisted and severely disfigured pædophile sadist, who – hang on, sorry, wrong Mason. Mason Goddard, Travolta’s character, is also a criminal, but he’s the loveable kind. Mason is introduced running a “so simple, it’s fiendishly brilliant” scam to steal supercars from an unlikeable billionaire, but in the manner of a Bond flick, this is a mini-adventure, tangentially connected to the main feature, mostly designed to introduce us to the hero and the world we’ll be spending time with. Mason has a glamorous girlfriend/accomplice, played by Kristin Davis who, at 59, is more-or-less age-appropriate for Travolta (she’s still 11 years his junior, but at late middle-age that becomes a much less significant gap). This is in stark contrast to Travolta’s higher-profile fellow Scientologist Tom Cruise, who has a contractual clause that he will not be romantically paired with any woman within twenty years of his own age*. And I think it makes Cruise look foolish, because Davis at nearly sixty is still quite beautiful, though she has begun to resemble an older Katie Holmes – Cruise’s ex-wife. It’s all inter-connected.
In any case, this super-stylish prologue actually set my expectations for the rest of the film pretty high – needless to say, they’d been low going in. It seems to be where most of the film’s production value went, anyway – we get to see a room full of a dozen supercars, which has to have cost an order of magnitude more than Travolta’s salary, and certainly more than the dingy rooms we’ll be spending the rest of the film in, for, you see, it isn’t long before Mason finds himself betrayed and washed-up, giving him little choice but to accept a shady, high-risk heist job against a dangerous target. And so Mason picks up some unlikely allies, including his brother Shawn (Lukas Haas) and a businessman played by Swen Temmel, an actor who looks distractingly like a young John Travolta. The two should be cast in a movie together, but as father and son, the same man in the past and the present, Temmel is Travolta’s younger clone, something like that.
Having picked up these allies, the business gets underway, punctuated by additional betrayals and further revelations. This is the type of film that is predictable in its unpredictability – you won’t always be able to guess who’s playing who and who’s just an unwitting pawn in someone else’s game, because those revelations actually aren’t always going to make much sense. The dialogue is equally predictable, made up mostly of lines you’ve heard in nearly every film of this type – but hey, it’s nothing personal. I know for the screenwriters it’s just business. Someone made them a better offer. And so on.
In the United States, these pictures are known as “geezer teasers”, because over there a geezer is an old bloke and not a wideboy down the pub. They’re low-budget, usually direct-to-streaming, and star Bruce Willis, or Dolph Lundgren, or Van Damme, Seagal, or anyone else who was headlining action films in the 80s-90s and has barely been heard from since. I think the state of Travolta’s career – considering he can act, he can dance, he can sing, he’s still not bad-looking, even bald, bearded and overweight, and he has a CV littered with classics – is surely evidence that the Church of Scientology don’t wield as much power in Hollywood as you might think.
*Note: this is something that I just made up.