John Travolta has famously appeared in a number of classic films like Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty and Blow Out – but he’s also starred in a ton of genuine stinkers, such as Old Dogs, Look Who’s Talking Now and the greatest mafia flick ever made by a sketchy movie subscription app: Gotti.
Then there was 2000’s Battlefield Earth, the notorious flop based on the novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, a film which mistakenly assumed that American moviegoers were hungry for a dank sci-fi epic starring the guy from Face/Off as an evil alien Rob Zombie.
But Travolta’s latest Christmas-themed commercial may be even worse than the movie Roger Ebert said was like “taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time.”
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John Travolta has been Capital One’s resident Santa Claus for a few years now, despite the fact that there is nothing especially Santa-like about him. Odder still, each ad combines the magic of Christmas with a riff on one of Travolta’s famous movies. Back in 2020, Travolta’s St. Nick Facetimed with Samuel L. Jackson for a baffling yuletide Pulp Fiction reunion. Sadly, Capital One refrained from casting the Gimp as one of Santa’s elves.
Last year, “Santa” returned to strut along the sidewalk to the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” à la Saturday Night Fever’s Tony Manero. Was it a little weird to see Kris Kringle stepping into the role of the disco-loving attempted rapist? Yes. Yes it was.
And now Travolta Claus is back for a new Grease-themed commercial in which he dons a red leather suit and belts out “Greased Lightnin’” while the elves soup up his sleigh. Eat your heart out, Clement-Clarke Moore.
It’s unsettling enough to see Santa gyrating on top of a hot rod, let alone doing so while covering a tune that is canonically about a teenage boy bragging about how much “pussy” and “tit” he’ll get thanks to his car. At least Santa doesn’t sing about how the “chicks'll cream” over his magical sleigh.
This thing was seemingly shot with live actors on a soundstage, yet there’s something about Travolta’s make-up and performance that makes the finished product look even more uncanny than Coca-Cola’s recent A.I.-generated Christmas garbage.
Even Tim Allen’s sanity-testing take on Santa Claus was better than this.
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