Face/Off

Year: 1997
Running time: 138 minutes
Certificate: 18
Language: English
Screenplay: Mike Werb, Michael Colleary
Director: John Woo
Starring: John Travolta, Nicholas Cage, Joan Allen, Alessandro Nivola, Gina Gershon, Dominique Swain, Nick Cassavetes

Sean Archer as Caster Troy: Still not having any fun.

This is it, dear readers. The lunatic pinnacle the ridiculous '90s action craze. The highest of concepts, the most ridiculous of stories. The most overblown performances. And some of the most scorching action visuals ever committed to film. The recent announcement that a remake is in the works is nonsensical. How can this ludicrous perfection ever be improved? Surely it's tantamount to blasphemy to even consider it? The two movies of the time that came closest to matching Face/Off for insanity were probably Con Air and Starship Troopers. I love them both, but Face/Off towers above them with ease.

John Woo is up there as one of the best directors of action we've ever had, but prior to Face/Off his output while in America hadn't measured up to the best of the films he had made before moving to the US. For Face/Off, everything finally came together.

Caster Troy (Nicholas Cage) is a Villain. Capital V. Hell, the whole word should be upper case. Murder, terrorism, drugs, Caster is just living his best evil life. A thorn in his side however, is super-serious cop Sean Archer (John Travolta). Since Troy accidentally killed his young son Michael (Myles Jeffrey), Archer has had a singular mission to obsess over: take down Caster Troy. In an astonishing opening set piece most films would save for the climax, Archer and his team finally take down Troy, landing him in a coma and capturing his brother Pollux  (Alessandro Nivola).

You'd think Archer would feel like celebrating, a least a little, after that wouldn't you? But no, when his colleagues give him a round of applause, he snaps at them, because of course catching Troy was never going to bring back his son, and he feels just as shitty about it as he ever did.

The problem is, before he went to sleep, naughty Caster planted a giant bomb, and nobody knows where, except Caster and Pollux. So naturally, the go to move here is to use plastic surgery to alter Archer into Troy and then swapping their faces. Not in some clever Mission Impossible mask kind of way, but by actually swapping faces. Then dump Archer into the most maximum of maximum security prisons to pose as Caster to find the location of the bomb from Pollux.

Typically understated moment of action.

This is, obviously, bonkers. But, watching Cage pretending to be Travolta's character pretending to be Cage's character in that full-on bug-eyed way that only Cage can do, you very quickly come to the realisation that it is actually a stroke of genius. And then it gets ever more ridiculous, because having his face cut off caused Troy to wake up from his coma, and he proceeds to force the orchestrators of this plan to alter his body and give him Archer's face. And then murders everybody that knows about it and destroys all the evidence.

Having taken over Archer's life, the scene in the prison when Cage playing Archer playing Troy sees Travolta playing Troy playing Archer for the first time is so much fun. The fact that it is played completely straight just makes it even better. Left to rot in prison as Caster Troy, Archer has an uphill struggle to escape and reclaim his life back from his nemesis. The rest of Face/Off is the story of how he goes about this, and it's every bit as over-the-top and bombastic as you could wish for: The prison escape turns everything up to 11. A shoot out with the police during which the gangsters are desperately trying to protect a young boy named Adam (David McCurley) which turns out to be Caster's son. There is some masterful framing at work, as Woo puts young Adam standing on some lights in the floor, listening to Somewhere Over the Rainbow on headphones while all hell breaks loose around him. The Woo signature of doves is present and correct, heralding the final showdown in a beautifully atmospheric church. Even the obvious use of stunt doubles in the crash at the end of the climactic speedboat chase doesn't spoil it too much (you read that right: Face/Off ends in a speedboat chase, because of course it does).

It's overblown, it's ridiculous, sometimes it's just plain weird (there is much face stroking going on for some reason), but, somehow, against all the odds, Face/Off works.

Score: 8/10

The brilliance and ridiculousness of Face/Off is not lost on others, as seen in these reviews by Tom at the A.V. Club and Benoit at Dead End Follies.