My World of Flops Bad Flick, M.A.A.D Shitty Case File #173/The Travolta/Cage Project #51 Mad City (1997)

I was living in Madison, Wisconsin and working for The A.V Club while going to college when I learned that John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman were making a movie that was originally set in Madison called Mad City. 

Mad City is one of Madison’s nicknames so it made sense for a movie set in Madison to have that title. Then, for some inexplicable reason, the filmmakers decided that Mad City did not, in fact, have to be set in Mad City yet they kept the title all the same. 

That’s a little like looking forward to a movie called The Windy City as a Chicagoan, only to go to the theater opening day and have the protagonist happily proclaim in the first scene, “Yes, there’s never a dull moment here in The Windy City, alternately known as Cleveland, Ohio.”

Now that I have finally seen Mad City I can vouch that it has bigger problems than not being set in Madison. MUCH bigger problems.

Dog Day Afternoon for Dummies, Mad City woefully miscasts John Travolta as Sam Baily, a working class father and husband who completely unravels after he is laid off from his job as a security guard at a museum. 

Now I do not want to suggest that Sam is not a smart man, or a dignified man but let’s just say that an appropriate alternate title for Mad City would be Ernest Takes Hostages. As with his similarly misguided turn in the similarly abysmalThe Fanatic, Travolta mis-calibrates his character’s simple-mindedness to a comic degree. 

Sam is not supposed to be clever or savvy but his oafishness presumably should not approach Ernest P. Worrell levels, nor should he unintentionally remind audiences of Barney Fife whenever he mishandles a firearm he seems to have no idea what to do with despite having made his living as a professional security guard for the last half decade. 

Displays of stupidity this cartoonish are usually accompanied by jugs of moonshine marked X, straw hats, filthy overalls and urgent requests for George to tell you about the rabbits. 

I somehow got it into my head that John Travolta’s career went to shit after the giddy heights of Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty and Broken Arrow and Face/Off. I was wrong. After Face/Off, Travolta continued to work with interesting and important filmmakers like Terence Malick (The Thin Red Line), Costa-Gavras (director of Mad City), Steven Zaillian (A Civil Action) and Mike Nichols (Primary Colors). 

Travolta’s career actually went to shit during and after Battlefield Earth, which was the true beginning of the end for the trash movie icon. But if the public learned to stay the hell away from new Travolta movies after his infamous L. Ron Hubbard adaptation, that’s because even before he started shouting about rat-brained man-animals in Battlefield Earth, Travolta made a lot of movies like Mad City, which are bad in a way that sticks with you, that engenders anger as well as disappointment. I didn’t just dislike Mad City: it genuinely made me mad.

Dustin Hoffman, who would later deride the movie as “Mad Shitty”, is similarly atrocious as cynical newsman Max Brackett. Once upon a time Max was a rising star in New York city until his career crashed and burned when he blew up at superstar journalist Kevin Hollander (Alan Alda) for his insensitive handling of a grisly story. 

Max is exiled to the minor leagues of small time local news when he stumbles onto what Mad City desperately wants us to think is the story of several lifetimes: a laid off security guard innocently returning to the museum where he was recently fired with a gun and dynamite in order to get his former superior’s attention and ends up shooting a fellow security guard and holding a group of children hostage. 

Like Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole, Max realizes that the key to his professional future lies in making himself the white hot epicenter of the story he’s covering and ensuring that it lasts as long as possible. 

Out of oily self-interest, Max posits Sam as the noble embodiment of the American everyman. He works overtime to depict him as a fundamentally decent human being, no different from anyone in the audience, really, who was pushed too far and made the simple mistake of confronting his old boss with a gun and explosives before accidentally shooting a guy and taking small children hostage. 

It could happen to anyone! It HAS happened to everyone. It happened to me just last week! It might reflect poorly on Sam that he’s taken children hostage but don’t worry: he’s such a puppy dog of a man-child that there’s no chance whatsoever that any children might be harmed. 

For a hostage drama involving children and an unhinged man with a gun, Mad City is perversely devoid of tension and danger, not to mention stakes. 

Honestly Sam would undoubtedly let all the children go immediately except that there would be no movie if he did so, and Max, in his capacity as both the devil and the angel hovering over Sam’s shoulder, won’t let him do anything that might end things too quickly or neatly. 

So Max drags things out interminably. The world could not be more riveted by the personal and professional travails of an unemployed former security guard. It becomes such a huge story that Jay Leno makes jokes about it on The Tonight Show and Larry King interviews the unlikely duo on national television. 

It does not speak well of Mad City that non-actor Larry King delivers a more fiery, committed and compelling performance than John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman. Granted, Max and Sam are exhausted after three days of non-sleep but King, looking shockingly young and vibrant for a dude whose shtick has always been that he’s older than God, absolutely wipes the floor with Travolta and Hoffman. 

Mad City needs us to think that the predicament that Sam finds himself is so inherently compelling, and Sam himself is so sympathetic and relatable that the hostage crisis has the world glued to the television.

But the only way I can envision the American public being riveted for THREE STRAIGHT DAYS by a hostage situation involving an unlikable oaf of an unemployed security guard and a museum full of kids would be if the unemployed security guard was, in fact football legend O.J Simpson and in addition to taking a museum full of children hostage, he also brutally murdered ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her waiter friend Ron Goldman. 

From the vantage point of 2021, there’s something poignantly naive about the once-cynical idea that a sensation-crazed American viewing public would be mesmerized for days by a grubby, depressed nobody’s criminal attempts to get his crappy old job and life back. 

I hated pretty much everything about Mad City, a movie devoid of a single emotionally authentic moment, including Travolta’s performance. He takes some big swings here, as usual, and whiffs hard. I can’t help but wonder if the movie might be better if the lead roles were reversed. 

Travolta would seem more at home playing a cynical slickster content to get by on charm and personal appeal while Hoffman has the heavyweight acting chops to make Sam a genuinely tragic figure and not just a loser. 

In the end Madison did not lose anything by not being the setting of Mad City. A city as sublime as my former home town deserves a movie way better than this abomination.

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco 

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