Movie Linemen,
Last night we watched a very important film. A film with very big stars and the best of plot. We watched Ivy’s inaugural pick, the 2016 Travolta opus, Life on the Line. In the grand tradition of Movie Night… this was a terrible movie.
In the ‘rush’ of this movie, I forgot to take any screenshots. Which is probably good since the only thing funny about anything is Travolta’s facial hair. Which could be described as a scared Halloween cat smashed against his chin.
This movie is so sincere, every moment just oozes saccharine sentimentality. Some things that you should know going in.. Kate Bosworth is currently 37, Devin Sawa is currently 40. Is this what we look like now?!
Plot!
Travolta is a bad ass Harley driving lineman with a full head of natural jet black hair and a beautifully manicured goatee. In an emotional opening scene, causes his brother to be electrocuted and then while following the ambulance to the hospital causes his sister in law to be hit by a truck. Just an impossibly prefect terrible emotional start.
smash cut to 15 years later?
And Travolta is raising his niece… by raising… I would say that she is his roommate at this point. Dear god everyone in this movie is sad. Travolta is still sad, his neighbor is an Iraq vet that is sad, his neighbors wife is cheating on him, his niece is still sad. Devon Sawa shows up as a boyfriend of the niece that wants to rekindle things. but he’s a no good slacker.
Man… it pains me to recount this movie… I’m calling a life line…
SPEED ROUND!
- Sawa’s mom is played by an almost unrecognizable Sharon Stone. She is in so much makeup that they might as well have just hired an different actor. She’s not playing a real person… just make her look like Sharon Stone.
- She hates linemen, because her husband was a lineman. She keeps screaming ‘I WONT GO TO YOUR FUNERAL’ … in a way that sort of made me grin.
- Travolta is running a company that trains linemen and does contract jobs for the state of Texas.
- Some one hires Devon Sawa, Travolta hates him.
- He is a slacker, almost gets Travolta killed.
- They get a big contract to fix “line 6” or some fucking thing.
- But that contract doesn’t matter because “STORMS A COMIN”
- A random local guy named Ron is the only “Bad Guy” in the movie. And he’s instantly one step away from a rapist in every conversation. Everyone else is an earnest blue collar stereotype.
- The ‘Bar Fight Scene’ is where the movie tries to be subversive and make Travolta deescalate the situation with his kind words and apologies. The movie is so fucking proud of this point.
- Part of the plot is that Kate Bosworth gets pregnant and can’t go to college, dude… She missed college 20 years ago.
- Why did they cast these two as the young love interests? I mean I get Travolta since he’s probably a producer or something. But is the world really clamoring for more Kate Bosworth
- Based on a true story… As in yes… There are linemen in the world and there was a storm once.
- Has all the linemen songs in the credits… except for the only one I know, Wichita Lineman.
- If you took all the exciting and fun parts of Armageddon out and filled them with statistics and information about the west Texas power grid you would have this movie.
- This movie is like hearing a Trump supporter describe a story that happened to his brother’s wife’s friend.
OK so now that I’ve zoned out… the end of the movie…
So… because a big storm has moved in, it causes a power line to come down, which causes a train to derail, which causes a wildfire. In an unrelated event ‘Bad Guy Ron’ decides to go rape Travolta’s neighbor’s wife, which causes PTSD Dad to get his gun, meanwhile Kate Bosworth wanders in and tries to break up the fight. Which causes PTSD Dad to shoot THROUGH “Rapist Ron” and shoot her. So Travolta is already bravely trying to fix the line so that the firefighters can get in a fight the fire. when he gets a call from the hospital that says his niece is in there and he needs to get the power back on or she won’t survive the surgery.
This is like the perfect storm of shitty life events!
This sets the table for the scene from Armageddon where Bruce will is sabotages Ben Afflecks suit and triggers the nuke by himself. Except that scene is Rad and Armageddon rules.
Travolta jumps on a big Frankenstein switch to close it and kills himself.
Power back on… town is saved or whatever.
Cue the Lineman Songs.
Phew! We did that thing!
And next week. if he chooses, it’s Jesse’s pick. please don’t pick THE GREASY STRANGLER.
-Mark
Life on the Line is a 2015 American direct-to-video disaster thriller film directed by David Hackl and written by Primo Brown, Marvin Peart and Peter I. Horton. The film stars John Travolta, Kate Bosworth, Devon Sawa, Gil Bellows, Julie Benz, Ryan Robbins and Sharon Stone. The film was released on November 18, 2016, by Lionsgate Premiere. The film follows a crew of high-wire workers fixing the electric grid but eventually they are hit by a deadly storm and need to survive.
source : wikipedia
This movie was a boiling pot of cliches and bad acting. I said on the night that it would make a good episode of The Flophouse or How Did This Get Made. But what I really mean is that it would make a mediocre episode of those, it just takes professional comedians to make this dreck really funny.
There is a story that this keeps reminding me of…
So up here on the mountain, the power goes out a lot and we have lots of linemen come into town and fix the lines after a storm. They all get paid double overtime and it’s a pretty sweet job. It’s still dangerous, but it’s not like firemen… right? I mean there’s not a hospital up here, it’s just a pain in the ass to not have power.
so anyway. my friend Jolynne was kind of pointing that out, that they are paid really well and she got into an argument with someone on facebook about the linemen… possibly someone who would LOVE THIS MOVIE. The argument kind of goes on a while, then dies out. We get power back on and go on with our lives.
Smash cut to at least a year later maybe two. Jolynne now owns a restaurant up here and is giving free food to the linemen that are working near her place. She posts this on facebook. The same person on facebook says that she has no respect for the linemen. Everyone is like… calm down random mountain dweller. But he scrolls back years on her timeline and finds the argument and posts it on the page. except he’s a little confused about some autocorrected language, and posts it with the title “I REMEMBER WHEN YOU CALLED THEM TATERS”
anyway, i can’t figure out what taters would have been autocorrect for… but I love it.