Mob Land review – kindly sheriff John Travolta drawn into blood-soaked plot

Feature first-timer Nicholas Maggio makes an impression with this punchy crime thriller set in smalltown Alabama. The director himself has cited Tarantino as an influence – though the borrowing is much more obviously from the Coens’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, with the seen-it-all sheriff and the sinister lizard-eyed killer coming in from the big city and making gas station attendants feel very uncomfortable by quizzing them insolently about their private lives.

John Travolta plays Sheriff Davis, a guy nearing retirement and trying not to think about the bad news he’s just got from his doctor. He takes a kindly interest in Shelby (Shiloh Fernandez), a young mechanic who is married with a young daughter; he soups up muscle cars and makes a few much-needed dollars at street races. But Shelby gets drawn into an incompetent criminal scheme hatched by his greedy and foolish uncle Trey (Kevin Dillon), who wants Shelby as the getaway driver while he robs an illegal opioid pill mill; goofy Trey figures there’s a big score of easy money.

But the robbery – a bloody fiasco, naturally, in which poor Shelby is far more directly involved in violence than he thought – results in a sinister mob professional showing up, wanting the money back and to make an example of these locals who dared take gangster cash; this is Clayton, brimming with malign mannerisms and played with relish by Stephen Dorff. I wish Travolta had been given a little more to do with investigating the crime and more chewy dialogue, but quite a bit of the latter is given to Dorff’s creepy killer as he makes Shelby his assistant in all the gruesome murders he now has to carry out. Well, it all hangs together and the final shot rounds it off nicely enough.