The great mysteries of life: The whereabouts of Amelia Earhart, what really happened at the Dyatlov Pass incident, the identity of Jack the Ripper, and how John Travolta got his heinous slop-mountain of a film into the Cannes Film Festival. The obvious reason is his star power. After all, Travolta is a legend for his performances in Saturday Night Fever, Grease, and Pulp Fiction, to name a few.

But Travolta could have built the pyramids, and it still wouldn’t excuse screening his awful directorial debut, Propeller One-Way Night Coach, at the most prestigious film festival in the world. Running at just over an hour, the end product, which Travolta also scripted, has the uncanny, garish feel of a young child creating a movie using barely functioning AI. Cinematic storytelling has rarely seen lows such as this, and the movie offers a hilarious yet horrifying viewing experience.

What is ‘Propeller One-Way Night Coach’ About?

In 1960s New York, 8-year-old Jeff (Clark Shotwell) is moving to California with his washed-up actress mother (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) in an attempt to reinvigorate her career. Jeff is a plane and flying enthusiast, and this is his first flight. We know this because Travolta narrates every single thing the characters do right before we see them do it. Travolta, as the older version of Jeff, will say, “I walked toward the plane,” just as we see the characters do so. And this goes on for the entire runtime. It’s like watching Breaking Bad for the first time with your boyfriend who has seen it five times and insists on explaining every single scene as you’re watching it.

What follows are asinine tidbits of Jeff and his mother’s journey. Important to know: Jeff’s mother loves to drink and smoke, but not as much as she loves men. What a wild tart! In fact, all the women in this story are glossy young stewardesses who serve Jeff and speak as if they had a lobotomy. One of the stewardesses, Liz (Olga Hoffman), is a Holocaust survivor — a minor detail the story doesn’t give a fuck about, though Travolta was likely convinced it added substance to the film. A real low point is when Liz brushes off her generations of trauma and suffering with a simple, “I’m okay, I’ve gotten through this.”

John Travolta’s Directorial Debut Is a Laughingstock

Travolta’s incessant narration is just him reading his own real-life book, on which the film is based, and every sentence somehow sounds like he’s reading it for the first time. Past that, there is nothing in the plot important enough to relay. Travolta is clearly clamoring to forge an endearing story of childlike innocence and wonder, as we view the entire journey from Jeff’s young perspective. But Travolta’s writing is laden with prejudices that could only come from an adult. The women are all passive players in service to men, which includes one stewardess who doesn’t break her squeaky-clean Barbie cadence as she’s getting strangled by a mentally ill passenger (yet another useless attempt to bolster the story with melancholy).

The casting of Travolta’s own daughter, Ella Bleu Travolta, as the beautiful Doris, the object of Jeff’s desires, poses its own problems when you consider Jeff is a child characterization of Travolta. No character is provided any real interiority or insight. It’s as if someone who has never interacted with another human in their entire life decided to make a character study. Women are lushes or slaves, every man is a lonely businessman, and children are twinkly-eyed innocents. It’s meant to have a fairytale feel, as the audience watches Jeff live out his greatest dream of riding a plane. But asinine details concerning Jeff eating a hot dog on a plane are pointless when there’s no greater conflict building throughout the film. There are allusions to Jeff’s mother being an alcoholic who is desperate to find a new husband, but the closest we get to any real turmoil in the mother-son relationship is Jeff being an asshole to her and her silently shouldering it.

Toward the end of the movie, I joined in with select audience members laughing at the sheer ludicrousness of what we were watching. Propeller One-Way Night Coach seems to be the yearnings of a man wanting to live out the fantasies he’s too old to have, so he hides behind the guise of a young boy. Equal parts heinous and hysterical, Travolta’s attempt at screenwriting and directing will go down as one of the most atrocious debuts ever committed to screen.