The Travolta/Cage Project #43: Kiss of Death (1995)
When we began the epic, years-long adventure that is Travolta/Cage and The Travolta/Cage Project our stated objective was to determine, scientifically, dispassionately, objectively and incontrovertibly who the greater actor and icon was, John Travolta or Nicolas Cage. It did not take us long to get our answer: it’s Nicolas Cage. He’s WAY better than John Travolta and I write that as a huge John Travolta fan.
How big of a fan of John Travolta am I? I have committed myself, and a good friend, to spending something like five years watching EVERY movie Travolta has ever made in his long, glorious, violently uneven and often just plain unfortunate career. And he has made a LOT of stinkers. I should know. I’ve seen a lot of them, and in many ways we’re only just getting started. Do I regret having made this level of a commitment to a man whose films are overwhelmingly not just bad, but outright stinkeroos? Sometimes!
Cage versus Travolta has so far been a Harlem Globetrotters-level blow-out and we’ve already covered a lot of Travolta’s best films. So it’s always nice when the Saturday Night Fever star wins a contest easily, the way he did the decidedly one-sided clash between his mid-period triumph Get Shorty and Cage’s mid-period nadir Trapped in Paradise.
It’s rare for Travolta v. Cage pairing to be evenly matched but that seems to be the case with Kiss of Death versus Broken Arrow. They’re both hyper-masculine action movies from acclaimed international auteurs: Kiss of Death was directed by Barbet Schroeder of Reversal of Fortune and Barfly fame while Broken Arrow found John Travolta facing off with action god John Woo pre-Face/Off.
Kiss of Death and Broken Arrow got good if not great reviews at the time of their release and take place in communities of manly men. And both films cast the objects of our enduring obsession as larger than life villains. In Kiss of Death, Cage gets jacked up again to play Little Junior Brown, an asthmatic, seemingly roid’ rage-addled criminal enforcer who is bumped up to kingpin when his dad Big Junior Brown (Philip Baker Hall) dies. In Broken Arrow, meanwhile, casts John Travolta as Major Vic "Deak" Deakins, an Air Force pilot who goes rogue and steals a nuclear weapon for the purposes of blackmailing the United States government.
I might have seen Broken Arrow while selling my blood as a college student but it’s hard to concentrate on a movie when your life force is being sucked out of you in exchange for fifteen dollars worth of beer money. Good times! I definitely have not seen Kiss of Death despite an amazing cast and a respected screenwriter in novelist Richard Price (Color of Money, Sea of Love, The Wire, Clockers).
I probably did not see Kiss of Death at the time of its release, or the intervening quarter century due to its singularly unpromising poster, an image of stars David Caruso and Nicolas Cage’s giant heads floating over a generic city street like Neo-Noir Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons.
The poster/video box for Kiss of Death basically says “Nicolas Cage and David Caruso are in this movie” and nothing more. You certainly can’t accuse them of false advertising—Cage and Caruso are indeed in the movie—but they are guilty of being maddeningly unimaginative.
There are so many elements the poster could instead of played up, like an incredibly deep, rich cast headlined by David Caruso, who made television viewers all over the world angry when he left NYPD Blue at the height of its popularity to pursue a career as a movie star. Ooh, I get so angry thinking of the man’s impudence!
Verily, we elevated Caruso to the level of a God due to his skill at pretending to be a police officer on television, but that somehow wasn’t enough for him! He wanted MORE! No wonder we had to punish him, and punish him harshly, for being part of something very successful, then leaving. As a movie star, Caruso was a terrific character actor.
So it’s fortunate that Kiss of Death gives Caruso a character actor role that happens to be the lead in Jimmy Kilmartin, an ex-con and small-time criminal who is trying to leave his past behind for the sake of wife Bev (Helen Hunt) and his baby daughter. That becomes impossible when his deplorable scumbag of a cousin Ronnie Gannon (Michael Rapaport, pretty much playing himself) shows up in the middle of the night and tells him that Little Junior Brown will kill him if Jimmy isn’t part of a caravan of stolen cars he’s helping move.
Against his better judgment, Jimmy does the favor for his shithead cousin and ends up getting shot by the same bullet that eventually lands inside the head of Detective Calvin Hart (Samuel L. Jackson), causing permanent damage. Jimmy did not actually shoot the detective but that does not matter to the emotionally and physically scarred lawman.
Being a man of decency and character in a world without honor, Jimmy initially refuses to snitch on his cousin. Ronnie repays Jimmy’s loyalty and sacrifice by relentlessly hitting on his wife and pocketing much of the money he’s been allocated to give to her in exchange for her husband keeping his mouth shut.
But when Bev dies in a car accident in Ronnie’s car early in the morning after having spent a drunken night in his apartment Ronnie realizes the tragically one-sided nature of his loyalty to Jimmy. Pushed too far, Jimmy snaps and gives up everybody but Ronnie so that Junior and his dad will think that Ronnie was the informer.
In a riveting performance of raw power and brutality, Cage plays Junior as someone who goes through life just waiting for an opportunity to beat somebody to death with his bare hands. When Junior gets word that Jimmy snitched he gets an opportunity to do just that in a set-piece set to House of Pain’s “Jump Around.”
Deep into his lethal beat-down of Ronnie, a repellent waste of human life who truly deserves to be beaten to death without mercy, Junior experiences an incongruous but deeply humanizing moment of vulnerability when he reflexively whines “ow” from punching a man in the face so hard and so often that it bruises his own hand as well.
It’s a seemingly improvised, spontaneous moment that says a lot about the character. Little Junior Brown is a goddamned maniac, a beast of a man with a tender side that comes out when he talks about his love for his dad or his asthma.
Kiss of Death is a remake of a classic 1947 Film Noir co-written by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer. It shares with classic Noir a keen eye and ear for the complexities and hardships of working class life, the way it pushes good men like Jimmy into corners where they are forced to do very bad things to survive.
With its shadowy Noir vibe and immersion in the murky depths of the underworld Kiss of Death sometimes suggests what Deadfall would look and feel like if it were a real movie from real filmmakers with a real screenplay and real dialogue and real characters, not just dudes with metal lobster claws because a screenwriter incorrectly imagined that would be cool.
In order to be left alone by law enforcement, Jimmy agrees to go wear a wire for the sake of bringing down Junior, who shares with Jimmy some of his very Cage-friendly idiosyncrasies, from his revulsion at the prospect of having the taste of metal in his mouth to an acronym he gave himself that doubles as his caveman mantra: BAD for Balls, Attitude and Direction.
Jimmy eventually finds himself in the middle of a professional skirmish between cops and the DEA that takes up much of the film’s third act and represents its weakest component. When chronicling Jimmy’s attempts to stay alive and free in a world that crushes men like him under its heel, Kiss of Death boasts the raw, visceral power of one of Junior’s steroid-powered punches.
When it turns its attention to squabbling between different divisions of law enforcement, it’s a lot less compelling, even with actors the caliber of Jackson, Ving Rhames (as a coke addict who turns out to be an undercover DEA agent) and Stanley Tucci (as a murderously pragmatic, ruthlessly ambitious lawyer who will do anything to get ahead) inhabiting the roles.
I did not know what to expect coming into Kiss of Death, beyond a movie starring David Caruso and Nicolas Cage and I was very impressed with its tough-guy artistry and craftsmanship. In a perfect world there would be nothing remarkable about a solid, well-made thriller like Kiss of Death but in our imperfect world its strengths are rare enough to make it something special.
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