‘Mob Land’ Invades a Small Town with John Travolta and Stephen Dorff
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Mob Land
Rating: 8/10
Director: Nicholas Maggio
Writers: Nicholas Maggio and Rob Healy
Style: Action, Crime, Thriller
Time: 1 hour 51 minutes
Review by Mike Szymanski
It’s tough to find a good movie to just sit back and relax and watch that reflects real Americana. This one does.
I truly enjoyed this noir-ish cowboy movie mixing superstars like John Travolta and Stephen Dorff with relative unknowns who can hold their own.
Small indie movies is where some big stars can shine without too many restrictions or stereotypes of their previous work. Take Travolta in “Lonely Hearts” or “A Love Song for Bobby Long.” Of course, there will always be “Pulp Fiction,” “Grease” and “Saturday Night Fever,” but Travolta does shine in small movies like this where they shot the movie in 11 days for $750,000 in rural Alabama and Georgia.
And take Dorff, whose career I’ve written about and interviewed him since his first film “Power of One” in 1992 and later in off-beat cult films like “S.F.W.” and “Cecil B. Demented” (directed by John Waters). He’s lately been playing gritty roles in Westerns like “Old Henry,” “Shadowboxer” and “Deputy” and worked with Travolta before with Bruce Willis recently in “Paradise City.” It’s all a lot meatier than the films he’s known for like “Blade” and “Somewhere.”
He’s incredible as an empathetic Nazi officer in a hard-to-find brilliant film called “I’ll Find You” which I have seen multiple versions of, but it never got wide release. If you get a chance to catch that historic drama, you’ll love it.AMix these two strong talents with handsome Shiloh Fernandez who was in a more authentic movie called “The Birthday Cake” with Val Kilmer and Ewan McGregor. He is a solid actor who plays a family man Shelby, who has a beautiful wife, played by Ashley Benson known as Hannah from “Pretty Little Liars.”
