John Travolta

Now more reliable for awards-show gaffs and gifs than decent films, can the former disco king remind us he can act?

The way John Travolta tells it, Nic Cage had trouble playing him in identity-swapping actioner Face/Off. He proved too slippery to imitate. “I can’t find you,” Travolta recalled Cage saying.

Travolta might be even harder to find nowadays, having hit new career lows. Forty years after he strutted imperiously into Saturday Night Fever, his films slouch to disc and VOD. Consider Wild Hogs, I Am Wrath and Killing Season: blips such as these make it tough to remember why we cared.

But we did, with reason. After TV work and a charisma-popping Carrie cameo, Travolta dismantled leadingman arrogance with a character actor’s precision in Saturday Night Fever, a film deeper than the Bee Gees’ falsettos suggested. If Grease channelled that canny charisma into high-grade pap, Travolta proved he could still act in Urban Cowboy and Blow Out. Yet career blows came with Fever sequel Staying Alive and aerobi-porn romance Perfect, in which his sweaty crotch grind provoked a mid-’80s plummet: from dimpled sex symbol to the kind of oily creep that gifs were invented for.

After playing second fiddle to dogs in Look Who’s Talking sequels, Pulp Fiction gave Travolta new legs. He then showed versatility, nailing

Get Shorty’s Chili Palmer before having fun in Broken Arrow, Face/Off and Primary Colours. Yet he blundered with Phenomenon, Michael and Scientology belly-flop Battlefield Earth, where his charm was lost to earnest preachiness. And bad hair.

He was enjoyably game in drag for 2007’s Hairspray; audiences still liked watching him dance. But it’s been tough since and he’s become infamous for awards-show mispronunciations and mishaps; those Scarlett Johansson gifs show how quickly (perhaps cruelly) yesterday’s boogie-hipped pin-up can become our online target practice.

On-screen, his recent performances rarely welcome scrutiny. Ham and bad hair are his crutches, whether playing beardy-weirdy villains, working-class joes, strained geri-action leads or, divisively, show-boating lawyers on returns to TV ( The People V O.J. Simpson). Sure, no one expects Travolta to rediscover his Tarantino-spawned ’90s hipster cachet, much less his ’70s sex-pot peak. But the rare sparkle he summoned for Ti West-ern In A Valley Of Violence showed what we’d like to see him do: find those acting feet again. KH