The action sequences are among the most intense and exhilarating you'll see in any film.
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"If I didn't love you so much, I'd have to kill you."
--John Travolta, "Face/Off"
After a brief stint in the now-defunct HD DVD camp, Paramount is back with their first batch of Blu-ray releases, among them this 1997 action thriller, "Face/Off," in which director John Woo takes an incredibly silly, virtually impossible premise and despite its limitations turns it into an entertaining thrill ride. The longtime Hong Kong director of such action films as "A Better Tomorrow," "The Killer," "Bullet in the Head," and "Hard-Boiled" came to Hollywood in the early '90s and made "Hard Target" and "Broken Arrow" before turning to "Face/Off." With a sterling reputation, he could afford to exercise a little silliness. Well, OK, maybe not this much silliness, but you get the idea. With a pair of actors vying to top one another in the leading roles, the silliness, while never plausible, is at least fun.
John Travolta plays Sean Archer, the head of a covert government antiterrorist unit, who has been after his nemesis, Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage), ever since the day six years earlier when Troy was responsible for killing his young son. Troy is a ruthless assassin who was aiming for Archer when he accidentally hit the boy.
The plot concerns Archer and his team capturing Troy, followed by the Agency persuading Archer to change faces with him. Yes, actually switch faces by cutting off Troy's and Archer's faces and then grafting Troy's face onto Archer's head. The reason for the face change is because the government learns that Troy has a bomb hidden somewhere in Los Angeles that could blow up half the city. If Archer can impersonate Troy, who lies near death in a coma, they can maybe learn the whereabouts of the bomb.
So, Travolta plays the good guy...and then the bad guy. And Cage plays the bad guy...and then the good guy. And then Travolta plays the good guy...and my brain hurts.
Let me tell you some of the things I liked and disliked about the film, starting with the positives. John Woo can direct a great, often balletic action scene, and the opening sequence in "Face/Off" is as exciting and graceful as they come. More stuff gets blown up and more people die in the first fifteen minutes of this movie than in half a dozen other action flicks combined. Moreover, he gets the adrenaline running without resorting to too many quick edits or close-ups but by using imaginative camera placements and concentrating on human interactions. The action sequences in "Face/Off" are among the most intense and exhilarating you'll see in any film.
In addition, Woo gets top-notch acting from his two leads--over-the-top, tour-de-force performances from each man--especially from Travolta, as the two fellows must exchange personalities as well as faces. Woo, his screenwriters, and the two stars are able to blur the traditional distinctions between protagonist and antagonist, and some of the time we can't tell which is which. It's a unique experiment in filmmaking and acting, and it comes off pretty well.
I should also mention that Woo gets good performances from his supporting players: Joan Allen as Dr. Eve Archer, the good guy's wife who is unaware of the face switch; Dominique Swain as Jamie Archer, Archer's rebellious teen daughter; Alessandro Nivola (wonderful name, by the way) as Pollux Troy, the bad guy's weaselly younger brother; and Gina Gershon as Sasha Hassler, the bad guy's former girlfriend. They lend a note of humanity to the tale and keep the movie from being merely another series of shoot-outs.
On the other hand, you have the plot. Oh, dear.... Besides its being silly, at least by the standards of today's technology, it's much too long at 140 minutes. I mean, this movie goes on and on and on, and when you think it's over, it's still not; it's got another twenty or thirty minutes to go! Woo could easily have cut a half an hour from the film with no loss of story or characterizations.
Then, too, who in their right mind would consider such a facial transformation as the one in this film, even if it were possible, and even it meant saving half of L.A.? And a microchip in the throat to duplicate another person's voice? Come on. And do we always have to have a countdown to disaster in these things? That seems so clichéd. And would the government really lock up two convict brothers in the same high-security prison as happens here, without anyone questioning it? And what are the odds of a near-dead man in a coma coming back to life and within minutes feeling better than ever? And, speaking of that, what are the odds that the police would leave a mass murderer, even one in a coma, completely unguarded? Indeed, why is there no security of any kind in an entire hospital?
Furthermore, there's the business of Archer's escape from the aforementioned high-security prison with such ease that it seems ludicrous, the things the characters getting away with defying description. And how about all those innocent cops who get blown away, some of them by the "good" guy? Woo must think we wouldn't notice such things, or maybe he thinks we wouldn't care. To say nothing of all the child-in-danger angles in the story. I assure you, the late film critic Gene Siskel would not have approved.
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