Dogs of Bore Case File #166/The Travolta/Cage Project #32 Eyes of an Angel (1991)

It’s human nature to gravitate towards the familiar. I know that I find a movie inherently more interesting if it was filmed in a city that I’ve lived or worked in. So when I discovered that the crazed 1991 melodrama Eyes of an Angel, which was re-released in 1994 on home video to capitalize on the success of Pulp Fiction, took place in Chicago and was filmed overwhelmingly in the city itself my expectations and interest increased accordingly, from “non-existent” to “exceedingly modest.”

But Eyes of an Angel hit disconcertingly close to home for me in other ways as well. When I was in my tweens and early teens I essentially was a main character identified in the credits as “The Girl”, a scrappy, self-sufficient and independent kid in late eighties/early 1990s Chicago living with a depressed, broke single dad who seemed exhausted and defeated by the incredible burden of having to raise a complicated, sad child by himself with next to nothing in the way of money or resources. 

Eyes of an Angel should resonate strongly with me. I know all too well what it’s like to watch the world take malicious glee in destroying the fragile dreams of a beloved single parent. I know what it’s like to be poor and depressed and rudderless and utterly alone in a city that doesn’t particularly seem to care if you or what’s left of your family lives or dies. 

So I speak with some authority when I say that Eyes of an Angel is total and complete horse shit. Its claim to be based on a true story is laughable. Eyes of an Angel is a miserable wallow in the depths of human degradation that shits in the mouth of its impossibly hardscrabble protagonists for ninety minutes, then implores audiences to have pity on the sorrowful plight of its pitiable hard-luck cases.

Yes, Eyes of an Angel is one of those maddening movies where everyone, but everyone, is a raging, psychotic asshole to the heroes for no goddamn reason whatsoever beyond the need for conflict and drama. Yes, the world is a terrible, hard and brutal place, particularly for latchkey kids and widower single dads. But it’s not this terrible, hard or brutal. 

Life is a never-ending gauntlet of humiliation and pain for John Travolta’s Bobby. His wife died of a drug overdose, leading him to get sober for the sake of his tween daughter (Ellie Raab) but rather than engender sympathy and compassion, Bobby’s sad lot only seems to inspire only furious, pathological hatred. 

Like Chains of Gold, Eyes of an Angel is a casually, and not so casually racist exploitation melodrama where a slumming John Travolta must protect a beautiful white child who has seen too much and grown up too fast from a cartoonishly evil Hispanic kingpin who threatens both his family and all that is good in the world.

In Eyes of an Angel, that cartoonishly evil Hispanic kingpin is Bobby’s brother-in-law Cissy (Tito Larriva of Tito & the Tarantulas fame), a bookie, dog-fighting impresario and all-around bad dude who blames Bobby for his sister’s addiction and death and nurses a murderous grudge against his ex-in-law and the father of his niece. 

Bobby is so desperate that he begs his sinister ex-brother-in-law for help despite his obvious hatred for him. Cissy gives him a job as a courier exclusively for the sake of being close enough to Bobby to ruin or end his life. Sober and eager to prove himself, Bobby has a stellar first day on the job until Cissy instructs his goons Richard Edson and Vincent Guastaferro to fuck with Bobby for the sake of fucking with him. 

Because the world can never be cruel enough to Bobby, the nameless goons are told to pretend that he came up hundreds of dollars short and beat him accordingly, only to have the rage-filled single dad turn the tables on the henchmen and make off with the money and their car. 

While begging for a job, Bobby gets a horrifying glimpse into his brother’s dog-fighting operation. When a Doberman Pinscher known only as The Dog (Tripoli) loses a match it is tossed off a bridge into the river, only to survive and befriend Bobby’s daughter. 

Bobby does NOT want another mouth to feed so he tells his daughter to get rid of it but the sad-eyed marvel just keeps coming back. Nothing, but nothing can stop him. When the dog ends up in the pound, he straight up leaps through a window to freedom like he possesses a Wolverine-like Adamantium skeleton. 

The dog then proceeds to follow the Girl from Chicago to CALIFORNIA despite being an ANIMAL and seemingly only hanging out with the Girl a couple of times. Honestly, it was easier to believe that a shark followed Brody’s widow from New England to the Bahamas for the purpose of exacting revenge in 1987’s legendarily preposterous Jaws: The Revenge than it is that this enterprising mutt would make the incredible journey from the Windy City to the Sunshine state to save a sad little girl he hung out with a handful of times. 

Eyes of an Angel would be more plausible if it was eventually revealed that the dog was a super-intelligent android canine built by the top scientists at the pentagon to track down and bring back soldiers stranded behind enemy lines than an actual dog that might inhabit our world, and not a fantastical world of pure fantasy and imagination.

Bobby’s life continues to suck hard even after fleeing Chicago with a stolen car and stolen loot. His car and the loot are both stolen because nothing good can ever happen for this cursed son of a bitch. At a convenience store Bobby buys his daughter a convenience store hot dog in an attempt to make her forget that she and her father are doomed to suffer the torments of Job until their dying day.

In a tableau that horrified and disgusted me to my very core, this man from Chicago prepares a hot dog for his daughter positively soaked with ketchup. 

KETCHUP! 

Can you believe it? If people know one thing about Chicago, it’s that it’s a deeply troubled city plagued by racism, gun violence and corrupt politics and schools. More importantly, it’s a place where befouling a delicious Vienna red hot with ketchup is considered the worst conceivable sin. 

Richard Edson playing a sleazebag? It happened!

In California, Bobby reconnects with his brother but it isn’t long until he too is giving our hero a hard time for being the kind of loser who can’t hold onto a job or keep his drug-addicted wife alive. If Eyes of an Angel were a 1970s character study about outsiders just barely surviving on the fringes of society, Bobby would undoubtedly emerge as a complex and deeply flawed but fundamentally decent human being who has held onto his humanity no matter how often and how hard he’s kicked. 

Instead Bobby comes off as a loser who’s also unmistakably something of an asshole, a rage-prone small timer who just can’t seem to get out of his own way. 

There are some actors who are just too goddamn handsome and charismatic to ever pull off playing everyday losers with nothing going for them. Travolta is one of these natural born movie stars. It’s impossible to believe that a man who looks and talks like Travolta would be violently rejected constantly and sadistically by the sum of humanity, that he wouldn’t even be able to talk a lonely woman into letting him and his adorable daughter crash on their couch for a week or two. 

Bobby isn’t much of a role. He smokes. He suffers. He’s sad. He tells the dog to go away. He suffers some more. He’s saved, preposterously enough, at a low ebb in California when he’s on the verge of giving up when who should stroll by but the DOG THAT TRAVELED THOUSANDS OF MILES TO BE PART OF THEIR SHITTY FAMILY. 

At this point the dog has proven that he deserves to be the head of the family. He’s got the smarts and the toughness. Sure, he may be a dog, but he’s still a WAY better parental figure than Bobby. 

Being kind of a piece of shit, Bobby agrees to have the dog fight one last match to pay off his debt to Cissy but the dog ends up saving the day by very nearly killing the one-dimensional heavy, but ultimately pulling back because this is one pooch with a heart of gold, the eyes of an angel and a brain as powerful as our most advanced artificial intelligence. 

Forget realism or docudrama; Eyes of an Angel maintains a silent film level of melodrama throughout. 

Eyes of an Angel isn’t just a bad movie. It’s barely a movie. Like the weirdly simpatico Chains of Gold, it’s a dispiriting professional nadir for Travolta that’s grubby and cheap, lurid and unforgivably stupid. 

Thank God Travolta’s comeback lurks in the very near future, because I don’t know how much more of this garbage I can take, and I have built my career on lustily embracing the very worst pop culture has to offer. 

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure 

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