My World of Flops Psycho Vs. Psychlo Case File #182/The Travolta/Cage Project #66 Domestic Disturbance (2001)

Success invariably breeds imitation, particularly in the world of film, where it’s almost always a safer bet commercially to stick with the tried and true than to attempt something different.

The extraordinary, zeitgeist-capturing popularity of Fatal Attraction in 1987 subsequently gave rise to a sub-genre of thrillers where the nuclear family and established social order is threatened and then defeated by a sinister outside force

In the years that followed that threat took the form of an impossibly sexy nanny in Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a psychotic tenant in Pacific Heights, a cop gone bad from moral rot and mental illness in Unlawful Entry and a murderously ambitious temp in The Temp. 

Domestic Disturbance hit theaters fourteen years after Fatal Attraction left an indelible imprint on film and American culture as a whole. It was more than a little late to the party but it owes its existence to Adrian Lyne’s iconic blockbuster all the same. 

Only this time the threat is not a mentally ill, sexually aggressive mistress but rather a stepfather with a violent criminal past he’ll do anything to keep secret, including murder.

Vince Vaughn plays Rick Barnes, the aforementioned bad stepdad, a glowering monster who has used ill-gotten loot from his criminal days as Jack Parnell to reinvent himself as a wealthy businessman and philanthropist in a sleepy Maryland town. 

One of these movies is just a LITTLE better than the the others.

Vaughn’s dead-eyed, glowering murderer doesn’t want the violent criminals he ripped off in order to finance his fancy new life to find him but he does a TERRIBLE job of keeping a low profile. 

If I were a career criminal full of dark secrets I’d operate furtively in the shadows but Rick/Jack is so ostentatious in his success that he’s named Man of the Year in the small town where he lives and his picture makes the paper when he gets engaged.

This attracts the unwanted attention of Ray Coleman, a former criminal associate played with scene-stealing gusto by the great Steve Buscemi, who puts on a goddamn masterclass in the fine art of playing a weasel in his too few scenes. 

Buscemi’s scuzzy career criminal seems to have wandered in from a Coen Brothers dark comedy or Jim Thompson novel. He’s such a proud degenerate that he damn near leaves a trail of slime everywhere he goes to mark his territory.

It’s an incredibly lived in performance full of novelistic, telling details, like when Buscemi marvels that the idyllic haven where his old criminal associate has chosen to hide from the world doesn’t even have an adult bookstore, something that obviously matters greatly to men like him. 

We get a good long glimpse at the resentful criminal’s active libido here. Ray is not just a fan of adult bookstores: he also has a thing for sex workers and 900 numbers. He’s comfortable with his own innate sleaziness whereas Rick has deluded himself into thinking that he can be a pillar of society without folks asking too many questions about where he came from and how he got so rich.  

When Ray pops up at Rick's wedding, the towering brute looks like he’s seen a ghost. Domestic Disturbance is never better than when Buscemi is mercilessly needling him about his new domesticity. 

“Did you register for a soup tureen?” Ray challenges a clearly mortified Vaughn, deriving great delight from his palpable discomfort as well as the absurdity of a man of violence like his old partner politely asking the universe for something as effete as a soup tureen. 

The problem, alas, with Steve Buscemi playing a supporting role  as a criminal shit-bag just asking the universe to kill him is that eventually he’s going to get his wish and then the film will be lesser for Buscemi’s absence. 

That’s the case here. Buscemi barely makes it past the half hour mark before Rick murders him with his resentful stepson Danny (Matt O’Leary) in the back of the vehicle. 

Rick’s marriage to Susan Morrison (Teri Polo) puts him in conflict with her ex-husband and Danny’s father, Frank Morrison (John Travolta). 

We know that Frank is a good dad because he’s played by Travolta at his most affable and paternalistic but also because he’s introduced ducking out of work so that he can be in the stands for a baseball game his son ditches. 

Baseball games play a role of central importance in movies like this. If a dad is too busy to go to his son’s game then that’s all the evidence a movie needs to judge him GUILTY of being a bad dad in desperate need of life lessons, often of the supernatural variety. 

Frank tells his ex-wife’s new husband and his son’s new stepfather that if he really wants to win the boy’s heart he’ll give him a baseball glove but the one game of catch they share quickly devolves into profanity and aggression.

Vaughn’s combination of gregariousness and menace makes him perfect for a role like the one he plays here. His justifiably paranoid lowlife and murderer has one hell of a resting psycho face; he’s never more than a millisecond away from a glowering, malevolent expression that conveys that he has beaten people to death with his bare hands before and will not hesitate to do so again. 

Danny tells the police, his father and mother that he saw his new step-father murder a man in front of his eyes. Alas, the low-level juvenile delinquent is a troublemaker with a predilection for telling lies so after dismissing his account as a fiction inspired he’s immediately placed back into the custody of his mother and a dude he has credibly accused of murder. 

Frank believes his son and begins to investigate his ex-wife’s new husband using state of the art 2001 tools like the internet. Thanks largely to Buscemi, Domestic Disturbance gets off to a crackling, promising, atmospheric start but things take a turn for the generic once Buscemi exits the picture. 

Buscemi’s creep has so much presence that he manages to dominate scenes he’s not even in. Hearing people talk about Ray and his sleazy eccentricities is more compelling than watching characters that aren’t dead do pretty much anything else. 

Travolta is perfectly fine as a good dad and stand-up guy with a bit of a drinking problem but there’s simply not much to the role or to Travolta’s performance. 

A movie like this usually runs a good 100, 110 minutes but Domestic Disturbance wraps everything up in a little over eighty minutes. It needs extra long end credits just to get to 89 minutes.

Normally I am obscenely grateful for lean runtimes but Domestic Disturbance is a little too streamlined. It jumps from “there’s something a little off about mom’s new man” to “my stepdad is a conscienceless murderer who will kill me to keep his secret” way too quickly. 

I could have used twenty more minutes of Buscemi subtly threatening Vaughn and Vaughn falling apart inside. Instead Domestic Disturbance is in an awful hurry to wrap things up so it can send audiences home a little early. 

I appreciate Domestic Disturbance’s succinctness but it nevertheless makes it feel like there is an entire reel missing, leading to a movie every bit as slickly formulaic, forgettable and mediocre as its title suggests. 

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure 

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