Travolta is back with a bang!

John Travolta: a movie life

On the streets of Ventura, a picture-perfect slice of small-town Americana about an hour's drive north of Los Angeles, a thick cloud of black smoke hovers under the midday sun.

Bullet-riddled police cars lie smouldering on the glass-strewn pavement. SWAT team members with open head wounds and third-degree burns take a moment to catch their breath. And phone their agents.

'One of the hostages just got blown-up, which isn't very nice,' explains the film's unit publicist, taking a drag on her cigarette. 'So there's a big shoot-out with explosions and everything... basically dead bodies everywhere.'

It's the final week of filming on the set of Swordfish, the $80 million action thriller that looks set to propel John Travolta back to the top of the Hollywood heap. Away from the orchestrated mayhem on the streets, Travolta and co-stars Hugh Jackman (X-Men) and Britain's very own Vinnie Jones can be found making some music of their own. Locked arm in arm and grinning from ear to ear, they break into an impromptu song-and-dance routine before returning to the job at hand. 'It's our version of a Holiday Inn nightclub act,' explains Travolta later. 'It's Danny Zucco and The X-Men - never B-minor, always B-flat,' he bellows between bites of a grilled cheese sandwich on the terrace of a local restaurant. 'You do those stupid things to keep your spirits going between takes.'

Travolta could certainly use a boost considering his recent misfires, capped by the most embarrassing flop of his 26-year career, Battlefield Earth. Adapted from the novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, the science-fiction film was savaged by critics and ignored by audiences when it opened just over a year ago. Not many actors recover from such setbacks, but with the rollercoaster ride of a career that John Travolta has been through, the smart money was always on yet another of his trademark comebacks. 'You get disappointed. You get sad. And then you move on because you have to,' he says now, seemingly unperturbed by the experience. 'Because there are other things, other new responsibilities? You can't get hooked up on all that.'

At 47, Travolta is one of the few performers who can accurately be described as a living legend. But he presents himself simply as a working actor, albeit one who can command pay cheques in excess of $20 million per film. The son of a working-class Italian-American family, Travolta has seen a fairytale lifestyle come true. It comes complete with homes in Los Angeles, Florida, Hawaii and Maine, and his own Boeing 707 to shuttle his entourage - wife Kelly Preston, nine-year-old son Jett, and one-year-old Ella Bleu Travolta - back and forth as necessity dictates. It also comes with the ability to once again dictate the course of his own career.

In Swordfish, Travolta plays Gabriel Shear. A former CIA operative, he enlists the aid of Hugh Jackman's computer hacker to tap into a multi-billion dollar government slush fund to fight the evils of international terrorism. Or something like that.

In practice, Skip Woods's script serves more as a device to link the film's main talking points - a succession of high-octane car chases, gun battles and explosions unfolding at breakneck pace, punctuated in its quieter moments by Halle Berry baring her breasts. This is, after all, a collaboration between director Dominic Sena (Gone In 60 Seconds) and legendary Hollywood producer Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard), which has enjoyed equally predictable US box office results.

Despite mixed reviews - 'Swordfish is trash all right, but it's canny, stylish and highly burnished trash' - Entertainment Weekly - the film has already earned over $65 million in the first five weeks of its American run. Simply put, Travolta is back. Again.

Although kicking around since 1975 (in movies such as Boy In The Plastic Bubble and Carrie), it was his super-slick performance as the cocky Tony Manero in the 1977 smash Saturday Night Fever that launched Travolta. The film that perfectly encapsulated the disco era, grossed almost £150 million worldwide, and made Travolta the hippest actor around. But it was his next film that propelled him into orbit. Although Grease cost a mere $6 million, it has made well over $300 million to date. And it did it with a genre movie companies were loathe to take on: the musical. Riding high, it seemed as if anything Travolta touched was a guaranteed hit. But nothing he did after Grease quite matched the superstardom he was expected to achieve. There was the odd decent film, such as Blow Out in 1981, but Travolta began to sink without trace. Even the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive, flopped. The only sign of life was in 1989 with the surprise hit Look Who's Talking.

Pulp Fiction, his dramatic 1994 comeback, and its director Quentin Tarantino, now pepper his thoughts and conversation. That pivotal moment in his career - returning from obscurity to enthrall a new generation of fans - figures largely in how he sees himself today and how he plots his career. 'After Pulp Fiction it seems there was this trust that studios and directors had - that I could do something,' he explains of the flood of films that followed. 'Quentin Tarantino, of course, championed me. And by him doing that, it allowed other people to give me room to express myself as an actor. That opened up an arena to do these kinds of characters that could be anything you could make them.'