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.”

They have a precocious daughter played by Tia DiMartino and Shelby has a trouble-making brother-in-law played by Kevin Dillon (who is known for playing troublemakers).

Shelby is a good family man with a wonderful wife and daughter. They are very cute together. His uncle is the Sheriff, played with the distinctive swagger and finesse of John Travolta. He’s bald, handsome, and sneaks a cigarette now and then that he keeps hidden in his car, with a lighter. He’s a tough guy who always knows more than he lets on, and has had his heart broken beyond repair. It’s a deep part perfect for Travolta.

But the guy to avoid is definitely Dorff as Clayton, who is sent by a mob boss to this small town to find some money that Shelby and his brother-in-law ripped off from a drug dispensary in town called the Happiness Pain Center. In the opening scene, Clayton smashes the heads of two guys and warns, “Pay your debts.”

He plays a character with no conscience or heart, but is it possible that someone can get to him?

The film discusses the problems of oxy in a small town. Everyone knows the drug is killing people, and Shelby thinks his brother-in-law’s plan to rob the shop is stupid. He reluctantly helps him, though, and that brings Clayton to a small town like the ones he despises.

What do people do in this town? The town is becoming its own cliche, and Clayton says, “Leeches come in and suck what’s left off the bottom.”

There is a foreboding tension throughout the movie as Clayton follows Shelby’s family, sitting at the diner where she is a waitress and figuring out how he will do his job with the most amount of horror possible. But he insists, “I never kill the innocent.”

Director Nicholas Maggio was 13 when he was in a friend’s basement and saw “Reservoir Dogs” (which I had the honor of being on the set for two days!) The 1992 changed him.

“That film opened my eyes to what a film could be and how the medium could make you feel,” the director says. “I was fortunate enough to grow up in the 90s, in the renaissance of independent film, and the birth of contemporary American Neo-Noir. I will always be a child of the gritty realism and beautiful brutality of those films.”

This movie is Maggio’s love letter to the Neo-Noir genre. It’s a story told in a straightforward manner with some surprising twists before it all ends.

It’s filled with guns, drugs, violence, cars, love and heartbreak in a typical small town in America when the wrong guy strolls into town.

Reflecting the director’s days growing up in Bakersfield and spending summers in the backwaters of Mississippi, the director recalls witnessing the life and death of the American dream.

Director Maggio sums it all up: “‘Mob Land’ is the movie I made for my 13-year-old self, sitting in a basement, eyes peeled, falling in love with film.”

And if that’s something that sounds like it appeals to you, it most definitely will.

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