‘Mob Land’ Review: John Travolta Anchors Nicholas Maggio’s Try-Hard Crime Thriller

Nicholas Maggio’s feature directorial debut, Mob Land, is a crime thriller in which two men rashly decide to pull off a robbery, frantically blunder their way through the job, and then face the devastating consequences of their actions. Sadly, the film itself is made with the same sort of overexcited energy, and the end result is similarly messy.

Shelby (Shiloh Fernandez) is a simple family man trying to make an honest living in a dying Dixie town. Here, drug overdoses are so common that the locals share the news of someone’s death like they would the results of a bad football game: worthy of quick commiseration but not interrupting your day over. When Shelby finds himself in dire financial straits, his brother-in-law, Trey (Kevin Dillon), suggests that they turn their town’s curse into a blessing by robbing a nearby pill mill. Shelby reluctantly agrees and, after the plan quickly goes awry, they end up fleeing a bloody crime scene with a bag full of mob money and a deadly enforcer on their trail.

Stephen Dorff plays mafia hitman Clayton Minor with a menacing intensity, but he’s mostly reduced to re-enacting villainous scenes from other, better movies. He distractingly channels No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh as Clayton calmly barrages a shopkeeper with probing questions and forces a waitress into a coin toss-esque game. He drives Shelby around at gunpoint, and makes him an unwilling participant in his crimes while espousing a stream of nihilistic philosophies, much like Tom Cruise’s character from Michael Mann’s Collateral.

Mob Land seems thoroughly enamored of the killer with a code, enthusiastically aping these past versions of the archetype and eventually even tilting him into almost the story’s antihero. But beneath this well-worn façade, there’s no real moral complexity or psychological intrigue to Clayton, as he’s just a guy who looks good smoking and likes to kill people.

A more successful piece of character creation comes with the man on the other side of the law, Sheriff Bodie Davis (John Travolta). The bald-headed, heavy-set Bodie is a true bodhi—a world-weary truth-seeker who tries to riddle out the universe’s mysteries through quiet contemplation. He moves heavily, speaks slowly, and likes to observe his crime scenes from a comfortable chair, ruminating quietly on the evidence before him. Travolta brings an air of stillness to Bodie while still retaining enough of that movie-star charisma to make the man’s occasional punchlines sing. “I’ll slap you asleep and then slap you for sleeping,” he chides another officer at one point.

Travolta’s scenes are islands of tranquility in a jittery sea of rote crime-movie pyrotechnics. From the word go, Mob Land abounds in quick cuts and swaying shaky-cam sequences, so that by the time that we actually do get to the more action-oriented scenes, this stylistic approach has long exhausted itself. And the sound is no less anxious to impress. During one emotional phone call between Shelby and his wife (Ashley Benson), Mob Land jumps rapidly between showing us the conversation itself and Shelby’s anguished reaction to it moments later. It’s just plain disconcerting, without adding anything to the emotional impact of the scene.

This hyperactive tendency is unfortunate because Maggio clearly has an eye for a shot. A hunting sequence near the beginning of the film ends with Bodie kneeling over the body of a deer, green forestry filling the frame with his crimson-colored hunting jacket at the center like a splash of blood. In a later scene, Clayton is shown walking away from a shadow-drenched porch where a horrifying act of violence has occurred, wandering out into the darkness like an envoy of death. Aesthetically pleasing, these images also feel like they’re getting close to what Mob Land wants to say about death and violence in this harsh but beautiful part of the world.

At one point, Ellis (Robert Miano), an elder member of Clayton’s crime family, chews him out for lighting a cigarette inside the car: “This Steve McQueen, Johnny Cash bullshit,” the old man says wearily, “it’s tired.” Turns out, what Mob Land really needed most was a wise old voice of its own to warn the filmmakers against such try-hard affectations.