BOTH Nicolas Cage and John Travolta Signed On to Star in I Am Wrath But Travolta Was Unlucky Enough to Actually Play It
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
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At a certain point late in their careers I genuinely think John Travolta and Nicolas Cage forgot that it was possible to make movies about anything other than men pushed too far who must pursue bloody revenge against the cartoonish bad guys who wronged them.
We live in a terrifying and overwhelming world filled with stories begging to be told, stories of love, of sacrifice, of madness and family yet Cage and Travolta continually choose to tell the same kinds of stories in the same kinds of movies.
Cage and Travolta love stories about vengeance, including Vengeance: A Love Story, which we’re pairing with I Am Wrath in the next episode of the Travolta/Cage podcast for reasons that will become obvious.
I was astonished and mortified to learn that at different points in the cruel, cruel teens BOTH John Travolta and Nicolas Cage signed on to play I Am Wrath’s lead role of black ops super-spy turned mild-mannered family man turned vengeance seeker Stanley Hill.
When Cage agreed to play Stanley earlier in the decade the film would have marked the Academy Award winning actor's first and only collaboration with William Friedkin, the legendary director of The Exorcist, The French Connection and Live and Die In L.A.
It’s possible that Friedkin would have tossed out the script, had it re-written or found a way to make it work despite its egregious awfulness but I can’t help but think that a Cage/Friedkin I Am Wrath would have represented an enormous waste of both men’s talent and time.
I have no idea what could possibly have attracted either Face/Off star to a script that’s little more than a vaguely Fascist parade of revenge movie cliches beyond the opportunity to play the kind of role they had only played forty or fifty times over the course of their career.
Chuck Russell, the man who ended up directing I Am Wrath, is a much lesser filmmaker than Friedkin but he is nevertheless a director of note with some hits and cult favorites on his impressive resume.
Russell is a veteran of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, having directed 1988’s Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors, which was co-written by Wes Craven.
He then directed a cult remake of The Blob and the smash hit Jim Carrey vehicle The Mask. He scored another hit with the Arnold Schwarzenegger bloodbath Eraser, which was the kind of hilariously over-the-top exercise in gleeful self-parody where Schwarzenegger quips, “You’re luggage!” to an alligator he shoots and kills.
The hits continued with The Mummy spinoff The Scorpion King, which introduces filmgoers to a charismatic wrestler who called himself The Rock but would go on to even greater fame as Dwayne Johnson.
Then came nothing. Despite proving himself an exceedingly commercial director proficient in many different genres Russell did not make a movie in the fourteen year gap between 2002’s The Scorpion King and 2016’s I Am Wrath.
I don’t know why a successful director like Russell didn’t get a film made in over a decade except that life is tough for actors and filmmakers once they reach a certain age, just as life is tough for everybody once they reach a certain age.
Unless you’re Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg, once your heat and youth have passed you generally don’t get to make the movies you want to make, the ones that speak to you as an artist and human being. Instead you make the movies that you’re able to make and those tend to be both depressingly commercial/predictable and unsuccessful.
Those stories, depressingly but predictably enough, are about men pushed too far who must pursue bloody revenge against the cartoonish bad guys who wronged them.
That seemingly describes half of Travolta and Cage's output from this era. It certainly applies to I Am Wrath. If In the Valley of Violence, the western that Travolta made with writer-director Ti West that came out the same year as I Am Wrath, is John Wick on a horse as a western then I Am Wrath is John Wick but terrible.
You know that meme of Bugs Bunny solemnly bowing while clutching a pistol accompanied by the words "Lord forgive me but it’s time to go back to the old me?” That’s pretty much the essence of I Am Wrath.
But before a vengeance-crazed Stanley can go back to his old, violent self we're introduced to the wholesome family man he has become when his wife welcomes him home after a successful business trip.
The trouble begins in the airport parking lot when a racist caricature of a Hispanic gangbanger with a goatee, face tattoo, sleazy mustache and air of unhinged intensity, approaches the couple.
The tweaked out Conservative fantasy gives these nice white people a story that makes no sense. He tells them that he’s late for his flight, and that his son is in the lobby and that he needs three dollars to buy his ticket.
Rather than point out that this gentleman couldn’t be late for his flight if he hadn’t even bought a ticket Stanley gently but persistently rejects the man’s requests even as his wife is about to give him A VERY SMALL AMOUNT OF MONEY.
This enrages the small time hood, who then fatally stabs the poor woman and injures Stanley. I Am Wrath lazily opens by establishing that Stanley dresses like a dorky dad, doesn’t smoke and doesn’t believe in God so that he can dress like a badass, smoke and pray once he's switched into full-on revenge mode.
I Am Wrath lets its hero mourn his wife and their life together for anywhere from two to three minutes. Then he smashes through one of the walls of his house and retrieves the instruments of his old life as a black ops bad-ass with Jason Bourne/John Wick level murder skills.
Stanley hooks up with Dennis (Christopher Meloni), a colleague from his days as a professional killer who now operates a barber shop because that’s a colorful way to make a living.
I Am Wrath is two-third grim, casually racist revenge melodrama about a man of violence who must use the special set of skills he picked up as a young man to destroy the people who have destroyed his new life and chance at happiness and one third incongruously sassy buddy comedy.
Even when they’re talking about people they’ve killed, or people they’re going to kill, or people they’d like to kill if given a chance Meloni and Travolta’s scenes together feel lighter and goofier than the rest of the film. The dour revenge elements aren’t any better and the disconnect between glib buddy comedy and grim crime melodrama results in constant tonal shifts.
Stanley and Dennis bro out about their shared past and love of assassinating people and quickly agree to go into the murder business together after Stanley identifies his wife’s killer in a line-up and the cops let him go, but not until after they’ve told Stanley that it’s not really their job to catch bad guys and also they can’t keep him in jail because of technicalities or paperwork or the ACLU or whatever.
That’s because the cops here are corrupt. They’re in league with Lemi K (Paul Sloan, who also wrote the screenplay), the Armenian crime kingpin behind Vivian’s not so random killing.
The moment that Vivian starts talking about crunching numbers for her boss the Governor I knew that she would be killed as part of a coverup. I was right but then it doesn’t take a genius to predict where I Am Wrath is headed. You just need to have seen a LOT of movies just like it. I’ve seen dozens of movies like I Am Wrath for this project alone.
Revenge movies are dodgy by design. They appeal to our ugliest, basest instincts, to our desire to see bad people murdered for their transgressions.
I Am Wrath veers unmistakably into QAnon territory with its paranoid portrayal of a sick, sad world where politicians whose families are guilty of sex crimes with underage girls conspire with a corrupt police force and drug-dealing gangs to fuck over heroic white people.
The moment Travolta reveals his super-spy skills you stop worrying about him and become concerned about low-level thugs who are no match for a world-class professional like Stanley.
Stanley pursues the path of vengeance until it leads to the man behind his wife’s murder: her boss the Governor. In the only scene that impressed me STANLEY has a life or death gun battle/fistfight WITH THE ELDERLY GOVERNOR OF HIS STATE.
The movie ends with Stanley killing a powerful elected official, then courting death by pointing a shotgun at the cops outside the Governor’s mansion.
He’s seemingly shot several hundred times but manages to live so that his boy Dennis can spring him from jail and lead him to the good life in South America.
I admire the ballsiness the Final Boss being not just a bad guy but the literal boss of an entire state. I can’t help but respect the chutzpah of that move but it’s the only thing that I will remember about the movie when it otherwise complete exits my memory two or three hours from now.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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