The Weirdly Racist, Crazed Crack Melodrama Chains of Gold is Egregiously, Gloriously Terrible Even by John Travolta Standards

We are experiencing a long-overdue culture-wide reckoning about the role of police in American life. Part of this soul-searching and reflection concerns the outsized part pop culture plays in the romanticization of law enforcement, in reinforcing and perpetuating the image of cops as heroic, larger than life figures standing steadfast between an ungrateful populace and outsized evil. 

Part of this cinematic deification involves the coding of characters from other professions who break all the rules and risk their lives to save their fellow man as fundamentally cop-like saviors. That’s certainly true of the heroic social worker John Travolta plays in the ridiculous 1991 drama Chains of Gold, the only film in the actor’s voluminous filmography in which he scored a screenplay credit. 

Then again “score” suggests Travolta lucked out in being forever associated with this flaming garbage. That is most assuredly not the case. The German video box for Chains of Gold is so intent on tricking audiences into thinking it’s yet another cop movie that it sticks the partially obscured phrases “Miami”, “Police Department”, “Special” and “Officer” behind a crudely photoshopped image of Travolta even though the character Travolta plays is not a police officer, or a special agent, or an undercover DEA agent. 

Nope. Travolta is a social worker in Chains of Gold and in the film’s second half he’s not even that. He’s an out of work social worker who conveniently does everything a DEA agent would, including infiltrating a deadly crack gang at its highest levels by going undercover, saving a cherubic white 13 year old from a brutal crack prison, wielding a gun like a veteran marksman and killing the main bad guy after instantaneously developing Jason Bourne-like reflexes and fighting skills.

When Scott tires of his social worker boss’ attitude and cowardice and angrily lashes out, costing him his job, it feels so much like a renegade cop getting thrown off the big case by his apoplectic captain that you half expect Scott’s superior to angrily demand his now former employee’s badge and gun on the way out. 

Name a more iconic duo!

Scott even has the hackneyed, lazy and cheaply melodramatic backstory of a cop movie protagonist. Once upon a time Scott was at the top of the world, making a fortune in advertising, the official cinematic profession of soulless professional mercenaries in need of spiritual growth and life lessons. 

Scott was also an alcoholic whose addiction and selfishness led to the death of his son in a drunk driving accident. That constantly referenced, endlessly exploited tragedy led Scott to get on the wagon and leave advertising for the less lucrative but more emotionally satisfying life of a social worker. 

Chains of Gold is not a subtle movie. It is blissfully devoid of subtext. We don’t have to discern for ourselves that our hero’s change in profession and sobriety are a direct consequence of his son’s death and his central role in it: it repeatedly comes up in dialogue, like when Scott tells Tommy (Blossom super-hunk Joey Lawrence), a thirteen year old client that he’s way too obsessed with, that he used to be an alcoholic and his son died because of him and that’s why he’s obsessed with saving all of the beautiful white children he can from the violent, nightmare world of Miami’s black and brown crack gangs. 

Chains of Gold depicts Scott’s total lack of boundaries in a positive light, as an admirable sign that he’s so passionate about the children in his care that he functions as a combination father figure/best friend to Tommy. As a former juvenile delinquent myself, I can assure you that Scott’s bond with Tommy is wildly inappropriate and incredibly unprofessional. 

If I were Scott’s boss I would tell him that he needed to make some friends who aren’t 13 years old and also his client. Instead, Scott’s asshole boss yells at him for breaking the rules and regularly venturing out into the field to save white children when he should be handcuffed to a desk, punching the clock and appropriately apathetic about both his job and his clients. 

Early in Chains of Gold we see Scott sternly deliver a moralistic lecture to an impoverished black single mother about how she needs to use her assistance money to buy baby food instead of wasting it all on crack or the money will be taken away. 

The mother in question doesn’t say anything; she just looks ashamed. We never see her again.  Like every other black and brown character in the movie she has a voice and a story that the movie is patently uninterested in. Chains of Gold could not care less about POC if they’re not glowering, silent heavies, evil henchmen who look like they stepped out of the “Beat It” video, nefarious kingpins or cops. 

It’s tempting to call Chains of Gold one of those hoary, condescending white savior movies that tell the story of black and brown pain through the prism of white heroism but the film is so casually racist and muddled and condescending that its hero only seems interested in saving not just a white child but the cutest, whitest, most adorable white child possible, a clean-cut  moppet who looks like he should be on his way to audition for a Wonder Bread commercial, not toiling in a crack factory (cracktory) or imprisoned in a crack cage deep in a crack prison. 

In Chains of Gold the problem of black and Hispanic crack gangs in inner city Miami is solved by two generations of smiling, dopey white sitcom hunks. The most lethal and cruel drug gangs in inner-city Florida are no match for the combined heroism of a grown-up Vinnie Barbarino and Blossom’s catchphrase-spouting brother.

Who could possibly resist an image like this?

For it seems Tommy has fallen in with Youth Incentive Program, or YIP. Unlike the hippies of Abbie Hoffman’s Youth International Party, who were known as Yippies, the child soldiers of YIP are HEAVILY involved in drugs. YIP are all about crack, specifically. 

YIP is ruled with an iron fist by its charismatic and mercurial leader Carlos (Benjamin Bratt), who does things like throw a giant party in a night club he’s rented out so that he can give the ten best crack salesmen in his crew gaudy chains of gold as rewards for poisoning their communities and killing children. This is no small affair; on the contrary, it’s a big deal, The Crackademy Awards, as it were, the Golden Crack Rocks.

Bratt really throws himself into Carlos’ cartoonish villainy. Bratt plays the character as if he’s a badass icon in the making. Since he’s a cable version of Al Pacino in Scarface (Chains of Gold premiered on Showtime in the States but scored a theatrical release in some countries), I started thinking of Carlos as Tony Hannah Montana. Carlos is an off-brand Nino Brown in the film’s bizarre mash-up of Blackboard Jungle and New Jack City. 

Our hero is intent on saving Tommy even if it kills him, so after leaving the field of social work he decides to go undercover as a new recruit in YIP’s crack army. Carlos knows that Scott just got fired from his job as a social worker. Yet despite being portrayed as paranoid and distrustful, the bloodthirsty drug kingpin has no problem accepting that a man who has devoted the last few years saving children from cartoonish monsters like himself has now changed sides and is now interested in being part of the machinery of getting kids addicted to rock cocaine. 

Carlos wants to expand to suburbs full of pure, innocent, adorable white children so he has an associate reveal all of his shameful criminal secrets to the suspicious new hire. Tommy ends up in a crack factory where mere children help produce rock cocaine but when he attempts to escape he somehow manages to end up in an even more hellish predicament, locked in a cage in an abandoned factory where Carlos gets rid of troublesome employees by THROWING THEM DOWN AN ELEVATOR SHAFT TO A PIT OF HUNGRY, MAN-EATING ALLIGATORS. 

When Carlos learns that Scott is not who he says he is, and is less interested in getting children addicted to crack cocaine than in saving one very special white child, he decides to literally throw him to the gators. Our hero gets tossed down an elevator shaft but gets caught up in the wires and manages to free himself from his predicament. 

High on adrenaline and danger, the former social worker transforms into James Bond instantaneously and begins shooting bad guys and fist-fighting bad guys and throwing bad guys into alligator pits as if that was his profession, and not something he’s apparently doing for the very first time.

Carlos climatically learns a very important lesson when he’s tossed to his death into the alligator pit by our hero: he who lives by throwing people down an elevator shaft to a pit of hungry alligators also dies by being thrown down an elevator shaft to a pit of hungry alligators. 

I suspect that if you were to ask the people behind Chains of Gold why they did not choose to tell this story of black and brown pain through black or hispanic lead characters they would answer that they could not get a movie made with that cast because audiences at the time were only interested in seeing white stories involving white characters, the dreamier the better. 

I’d like to think that we’ve evolved since then in terms of representation of black and brown lives onscreen but not anywhere near as much as we should have. 

According to the opening credits, Chains of Gold is "based on actual events” but you don’t have to be a former juvenile delinquent like myself to know that’s just not true. 

Wikipedia tactfully acknowledges the film’s innate, all-consuming bogusness when it observes “The opening credits state that Chains of Gold is "based on actual events", though details of the actual events themselves remain difficult to pin down.” 

Chains of Gold is a lurid cartoon fever dream based on racist fantasies of innocent white children at the mercy of evil, non-white criminal monsters rather than headlines or anything even vaguely resembling reality.

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco  

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