Travolta/Cage #22: Broken Arrow/Kiss of Death (with Joe Berkowitz)

This week, Travolta/Cage hurtles inevitably into the over-amped action movie phase of our subjects’ careers, as John Travolta shacks up with Hong Kong action wunderkind Broken Arrow! Smirking and smarming his way into his first all-out villain role, Travolta plays an Air Force bomber pilot who decides to steal some nukes for some easy money, with only the wiry Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis to stop them. There are no doves, but there’s plenty of ‘90s cheese. Ain’t it cool?

On the other side of the coin, Nic Cage is up to his usual tricks, playing the tic-heavy Little Junior Brown in Barbet Schroeder’s Kiss of Death, a remake of a 1947 film noir starring David Caruso (trying desperately to kickstart a film career post-NYPD Blue) as an ex-con wrapped up in a convoluted web of New York mob mayhem. Sure, it’s a bevy of that-guy character actors (Michael Rapaport! Stanley Tucci! Philip Baker Hall!), but it’s Cage, crying and gurning as an asthmatic tough-guy with a goatee and white tracksuit, who steals the whole thing out from under everyone.

Riding shotgun with us on this wild ride is Fast Company culture writer (and author of American Cheese) Joe Berkowitz, diving through the air guns akimbo and bench-pressing strippers to prove his might.

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