Face/Off (1997) * * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: The first American production by John Woo to equal or rival his Hong Kong work.
Most people I know sit in the movies and tick off whole lists of blown opportunities. They sit there and go, "You know, if only he had gone back and told that guy off, then the movie would have been *really* interesting." Most movies are anthologies of ideas that near-miss. Happily, FACE/OFF is not one of those movies.
Calling FACE/OFF an "action thriller" is like calling a Maserati a "commuter vehicle". You have the function -- maybe -- but not the form. FACE/OFF wraps a muscular action plot in a story of remarkable emotional resonance, one in which *no* mental stone gets unturned.
Consider the premise. An antiterrorist expert named Sean Archer (John Travolta) is obsessed with capturing his number one quarry, a mad-dog manic named Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage). Violence ensues, in which Castor is thrown into a coma. All too late, he learns that Castor has planted a bio-chemical bomb somewhere in L.A., and that only Castor's equally unhinged brother Pollux knows where it is. After a good deal of failure, Sean finally buckles and allows a bizarre plan to be enacted: his face and Castor's are surgically swapped, and he is sent to sweet-talk Pollux into revealing the location of the bomb.
Yes, this is neat. Preposterous as all hell, but neat. What's even neater is the twists that develop later on, when Archer is betrayed and forced to live with Castor's face and body. In the process, both he (and his enemy, about whom the less said the better) make many unnerving discoveries about each other's lives, and their own. How do you behave when the young son of the man you have wanted dead for so long tries to embrace you?
This whole level of emotional context shoots under the skin of FACE/OFF and raises it above being just a technically clever effects show. It's about personalities and attitudes as much as it's about plots, guns, and Mexican stand-offs, of which John Woo is perpetually fond. Although in his movies, they're always used as means to an end -- they further a deeper story. FACE/OFF is right in that grand tradition.
The acting is fascinating and creepy. Both Travolta and Cage swap voices, faces, and even work to exchange mannerisms. Look carefully at the cafeteria brawl scene, where Cage (playing Travolta's character) screams out "I'm Castor Troy!" and uses violence as a way of trying to check his real anger and self-loating. Or the creepy scene where Travolta (playing Cage's character) tells his daughter how to deal with a guy who won't say no. Most movies don't have the fiendishness to try this kind of stuff out. FACE/OFF wears it like a good suit of clothes.
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