The Travolta/Cage Project Extra: Die Hart (2020)
I woke up this morning to something as wonderful as it is rare and unexpected: good news involving the late-period career of John Travolta, the subject of the Travolta/Cage podcast, the Travolta/Cage Project and eventually a lengthy tome entitled The Travolta/Cage Project: The Book of John.
By the time I finish The Travolta/Cage Project I will have written way too much about the complete filmographies of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta for just one book so I’m splitting it into two, one devoted to each actor.
I am, needless to say, deeply invested in the poor man’s career, to the point where I legitimately feel proud of him when something good happens, the way you would with a good friend.
Travolta has had a particularly rough go of it these past few years. The Saturday Night Fever icon’s attempts to reestablish himself as a heavyweight dramatic actor in Gotti and The Fanatic were laughed offscreen and quickly and deservedly joined Battlefield Earth in the great pantheon of all-time stinkeroos.
Travolta lost his radiant and much-missed wife and frequent costar Kelly Preston when she shocked the world by dying of breast Cancer in July of last year after fighting a private battle with the disease with her husband by her side.
Travolta REALLY needs a win so I was delighted to discover that Die Hart, Travolta’s only major credit since the spectacular failure of The Fanatic in 2019, had been renewed for a second season despite having the following strikes against it:
It stars John Travolta
It debuted on Quibi, which is the John Travolta of phone-based streaming services in that it is synonymous with humiliating show-business failure.
Die Hart has something very big going for it commercially, however, something massive enough to counteract the John Travolta and Quibi factors: the central presence of Kevin Hart, who remains a huge star in film and stand-up comedy despite dabbling extensively in the field of homophobia and gay panic-themed comedy on Twitter and in his stand-up a decade back.
I was a little surprised to learn that Hart had explored that particular vein of “comedy” because what I’ve always found appealing about Hart as a performer is that he deviates so greatly from our culture’s conception of traditional masculinity.
Hart is like an eager Labradoodle puppy in a world of macho wolves. That struggle to be recognized as a man’s man despite Lilliputian dimensions is the core of Die Hart. It’s a surprisingly sly and funny show-business satire that finds Hart playing a fictionalized version of himself as a popular stand-up comedian and movie star who has come to hate his career and himself.
The series’ meta-Kevin Hart is tired of playing Dwayne Johnson’s sassy, emasculated comic sidekick and spouting inane catchphrases. He wants to be taken seriously as an action star and leading man and after a profane meltdown on national television he gets his chance when an eccentric auteur played by Jean Reno expresses an interest in casting him in the lead role of his gritty, serious new action epic.
The catch? In order to win the role and prove himself as an action star and as a man he first needs to enroll in Ron Wilcox’s Action Star School, a sort of secret academy for wannabe tough guys that, according to its own lore, has trained everyone from Randy “Macho Man” Savage (who was so appreciative that he left it a lifetime supply of Slim Jims in his will), to Oscar-winner Matt Damon, who was famously 100 pounds soaking wet when he entered the school and Jason Bourne when he left.
Ron Wilcox is played by a bald and ruggedly bearded John Travolta, who signed on after Bruce Willis passed on the role. That’s right: Bruce Willis passed on a part. Crazy, huh? I am just as shocked as you are. I wasn’t aware that was even possible. Judging by his recent career, Willis says yes to everything, no matter how rinky-dink or sad but to his credit or detriment, Willis apparently couldn’t wrap his mind around the concept of Quibi, possibly because it was an incredibly stupid idea that was bound to fail.
The show’s title makes a lot more sense with Willis as Hart’s costar but the sleepwalking paycheck-collector’s loss is Travolta’s gain.
Liberated momentarily from generic action movies and bad hairpieces, Travolta is a goddamn delight as a larger-than-life guru whose methods are not only unconventional but also unethical, criminal and potentially fatal as well.
Ron Wilcox operates out of a former slaughterhouse where the animals apparently rose up against their human overlords, something that only contributes to the bad vibes.
The charismatic lunatic runs his school like a cross between a Marine boot camp, an acting school so tough students might not survive it, and a prison. The accommodations are spartan. The lessons are dangerous and wildly irresponsible and the teacher seems awfully cavalier about the prospect/inevitability of students dying violent deaths under his care.
Nathalie Emmanuel from Game of Thrones costars as Hart’s fellow student, a sitcom star looking to make a similar leap from hack comedy to hardcore action.
Die Hart has tremendous fun with the fanciful notion of a secret acting school, unknown to the world at large, being behind EVERY action star ever, beginning with a gentleman who consummate name dropper Ron lovingly refers to as “Charles Norris, you know him as Chuck.”
Travolta is clearly having a blast playing the ultimate show-business phony and Josh Hartnett is similarly fun in a scene-stealing turn as a fictionalized version of himself as one of the Ron Wilcox’s most distinguished students.
Hart is a big movie star but in Die Hart he’s self-deprecating to an almost masochistic degree as an insecure man-child who wants to be seen as tough and masculine but is terrified of squirrels and thoroughly flummoxed by his new acting teacher’s unique ideas.
Die Hart begins as an action-comedy riff on the central dynamic of the half-forgotten Adam Sandler/Jack Nicholson blockbuster (and later Charlie Sheen television show) Anger Management, with Travolta in the Jack Nicholson role of the crazy teacher who seems intent on driving his students insane and/or breaking their spirits and Hart in the Sandler role of the freaked out student.
The action takes a turn into Bowfinger/The Truman Show territory once it becomes apparent that Ron Wilcox’s acting school isn’t quite what it seems. The line between real and fake becomes hopelessly blurred as the lessons in action and acting give way to the real thing.
As long as it limits itself to the deadpan goings on at the school for action heroes, Die Hart is solidly funny in its smart-ass deconstruction of action, macho American masculinity and how the testosterone-poisoned conventions of the action genre poison our conception of what it means to be a man.
At a certain point, however, Die Hart makes the leap from satire to relatively straight up action and loses much of its comic mojo in the process.
It does not help that Travolta is offscreen for much of the action climax and Die Hart suffers during his periodic absences.
Die Hart begins stronger than it ends but if you’re a fan of John Travolta and want to see him having fun and being funny I highly recommend it. I can take or leave Kevin Hart but Die Hart plays to his very real strengths as a straight man and physical comedian and he and Travolta make for quite a team.
Besides, considering how MIA Travolta has understandably been over the past few years, it’s just nice to see him back in action, and in a clever spoof of the genre rather than another generic, direct-to-video thriller for once.
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