My World of Flops Case File #157/The Travolta/Cage Project #18 Two Of a Kind (1983)
We have reached a point in our epic journey through the complete filmographies of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta where their paths begin to diverge dramatically. Cage is ascending to a higher level of artistry with masterpieces that will play a huge role in his legend, important, eminently re-watchable cult classics like Raising Arizona, Moonstruck and Vampire’s Kiss.
Travolta, in sharp contrast, is churning out the world-class stinkeroos that will soon make him synonymous with flops and cinematic failure, high-profile duds like Staying Alive, Two Of a Kind and Perfect.
After the remarkable run of Carrie, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Welcome Back Kotter, Blow Out and Urban Cowboy Travolta got scared, skittish and safe. He spent 1983 revisiting past triumphs but what worked spectacularly well before yielded decidedly different result the second time around.
Despite boffo box-office, Staying Alive urinated lustily on the legacy of Saturday Night Fever while the flop fantasy romantic comedy Two of a Kind reunited Grease stars John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John for a project so dismal that its stars probably would have been better off blessing Grease 2 with a dual cameo than wasting their time and explosive star-power on this fizzy drivel.
Two of a Kind opens in a very lazily conceived heaven (think white, and then stop thinking because you’re there) with God deciding that humanity fucking sucks, and is probably beyond redemption, so why not make with another world-destroying flood just to shake things up a little?
He’s God. He’s been around forever. Can you even imagine how boring that must be?
“I think I have to do something dramatic. I want to start over. You remember the Bible? Adam and Eve? Maybe I’ll start with a woman” God tells angels played by Scatman Crothers, Beatrice Straight, Charles Durning and Cástulo Guerra, injecting the “Maybe I’ll start with a woman” with an incongruously lascivious undercurrent that suggests that maybe if this new Eve is hot enough, he’ll bang her Himself.
When the angels protest that the God promised humanity that he would not punish them with another civilization-destroying flood, He replies, “HEY! I’m God! I changed my mind!”
As voiced by Gene Hackman in a voice cameo that implicitly screams “I was compensated VERY handsomely for an hour or so of talking into a microphone”, the God of Two of a Kind is not the wrathful deity of the Old Testament. He does not inspire fear and awe simultaneously. He’s more of an asshole, a vindictive creep who decides to slaughter his children en masse because he’s understandably disappointed in humanity as a whole.
This off-brand Judeo-Christian God decides to unleash the apocalypse pretty much because he’s bored and thinks there may be some LOLs in starting over from scratch.
I’ve always seen Hackman as an actor who brings a sense of automatic authenticity and conviction to every role he plays. We inherently believe Hackman is who he is playing because of the actor and his history. That is most assuredly not true here. Nothing is remotely convincing about Two of A Kind and everything is aggressively half-assed, particularly its Asshole God.
The angels convince God to give humanity one final chance to prove itself and prevent a second great flood with a wager: if two ordinary human beings are willing to sacrifice themselves for each other within one week’s time then God will spare his children. If they do not, then He gets to kill billions of humans because, you know, He’s God, so it’s okay, I guess?
The fate of the world and its billions of inhabitants hangs in the balance of this dumb bet yet the stakes in Two of a Kind paradoxically could not feel any lower. The watery demise of a world this dumb would honestly not represent any great loss.
For the guinea pigs in this great experiment the angels choose Zack (Travolta), a crackpot inventor of sub-Ronco contraptions like edible sunglasses, and Debbie (Newton-John), an Australian immigrant and aspiring actress who meets cute with Zack when he robs the bank she’s working at in a desperate bid to pay off loan sharks.
Zack is introduced looking like a new wave album color, practicing the weird pick-up lines he plans to use on one lucky/unlucky teller at the bank. Smiling that dazzling, mega-watt John Travolta smile, Zack gushes, “I came to you because I think you are by far the foxiest chick in this bank.”
This handsome idiot apparently labors under the delusion that if he’s charming enough he won’t actually have to use a gun or force to successfully rob a bank; instead, the teller will be so smitten with him and his honeyed come-ons that she’ll just GIVE him the money, consequences be damned.
Because Two of a Kind is a very stupid, very ridiculous movie Zack DOES end up charming the holy living fuck out of a teller with his “give me the money in the safe, you beautiful babe you” routine because the teller in question is Debbie, and she’s so bored with her day job that she thinks nothing of writing her phone number on the bag ostensibly containing the money Zack is after.
Perhaps because he’s wearing a shaggy blonde Olivia Netwon-John wig with a distractingly fake brown mustache that starts to come off mid-robbery, Debbie seems amused and mildly bored by the robbery, rather than scared or intimidated.
Then again, Debbie is wilier than she first appears. She uses the robbery to fake-out Zack and steal the money for herself. It turns out that, like Zack, she is an opportunistic thief who sees felony theft as her way out of a world of debt and struggling. AND like Zack, she is a dreamer doggedly pursuing her impossible aspirations. There’s just word to describe this pair: soulmates. Or simpatico. Alternately, you could say that they are two of a kind.
When Zack realizes that the foxiest chick in the bank stole the money that he was in the process of stealing he is angry, and gets the money back but ends up falling in love with Debbie over the course of a “falling in love” montage.
The devil descends upon the earth in the elegantly, extravagantly mustachioed and impeccably dressed form of Oliver Reed. The English ham is clearly having a blast playing the ultimate bad guy, a Beatles-loving lunatic overjoyed by the prospect of another great flood and billions upon billions of violent deaths.
Will two crooks with nothing much to lose overcome their selfish, human nature and prove that, in spite of everything, people are truly good at heart, or will their inability to look beyond their own needs and desires doom humanity? The answer, needless to say, is never in doubt.
You might imagine that a light, fantasy comedy about the end of the world potentially being brought about by greed and arrogance would register much differently in light of the current bleak cultural moment, when the extinction of all life on earth feels closer than at any time in my lifetime. You would be wrong.
Two of a Kind appropriately enough has exactly two things going for it. The romantic and sexual chemistry of Travolta and Newton-John remains strong, even in a barren comic wasteland like this. Actors and actresses don’t get more charming or charismatic than Travolta or Newton-John but their charm and magnetism is all that’s keeping this rickety contraption just barely afloat.
Secondly, Two of a Kind is mercifully brief, with a running time that barely passes the eighty minute mark.
Having recently suffered through all 101 interminable minutes of 1983’s The Man Who Wasn’t There, a film that seemed to last several days, I found myself feeling obscenely grateful that Two of a Kind wraps up in a trim 81 minutes.
Writer-director John Herzfeld seems to have realized that he had a big-league turkey on his hands and cut it down to the bone. The result feels unmistakably rushed, even unfinished at points. For example the angels and our heroes prove that people are capable of great good as well as evil and save the world from destruction but we never hear from God ever again, possibly because Hackman understandably didn’t want to waste five minutes of his life recording voiceover that would provide a more satisfying conclusion.
Oh well, if you can’t be good, you can at least be short and letting us out early represents Two of a Kind’s sole act of kindness.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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