A Civil Action

Travolta has made an art form out of smoking. The fingers are this way or that way, the cigarette turned in or out. It's different and distinctive in all of his modern films (I'm not sure about his faggin' style in the likes of Grease, Saturday Night Fever or as Vinnie Barbarino in Welcome Back Kotter)

But in A Civil Action he doesn't light up at all. Another first!

In fact he ends up so squeaky clean in A Civil Action that I thought that we might have been going to see something really new and have his lawyer with a heart launch into a Steven Segal speech about how we now need to look after the environment and not even smoke cigarettes. But no Travolta just went dumb. The cat got his tongue.

In A Civil Action John Travolta plays Jan Schlictmann a hot shot personal injury lawyer, an ambulance chaser.

He takes on a case against a couple of companies who apparently have poisoned the water to a small town where a number of children have died of leukaemia. The film is based on a book, apparently based on true events which took place at the start of this decade - although we really can't believe everything we read in promotional material.

The opposing lawyer is played by the always excellent Robert Duvall and the plot is well, confusing. This is largely because apparently in America lawyers can drag in witnesses in front of the opposing law team,with no judge or court in place, and demand answers. Then they do a deal and mostly don't even go to court.

Once we Australian's figure that out then we're faced with the fact that it appears that big chunks of the tale seem to be just left out of A Civil Action. But that's all OK really because A Civil Action is so utterly predictable for 99 percent of the movie that you or even I could have written the script over one or maybe two cups of coffee.

The other 1 percent must have been by accident.

So it's inevitable that at the end of A Civil Action the nasty lawyer turns honest, loses all of this dough and then surprisingly applies for bankruptcy. He's asked by the judge how on earth (and more particularly how on earth in the good ol' USA) he could have possibly ended up broke.

Segal would have made a 60 second speech about the planet's ills. Travolta just goes quiet.

It wouldn't do for a mainstreamer like Travolta to state that money isn't everything. Would it?