Yeah, that’s right motherfuckers, we are talking about ci-ne-MA! We’re celebrating the 25th anniversary of Chinese action auteur John Woo’s third English-language film, the 11th highest grossing film of 1997, a lone Oscar nominee in the now-subsumed Sound Editing category (may her memory be eternal) that was inevitably bulldozed by Titanic. It's one of the most voluptuously insane movies Nicolas fucking Cage has ever appeared in; Face/Off, where they take the face OFF.
Anyone who knows me knows I’ve been proselytizing about this film for years, ever since I first saw it with my sister Melina and some friends of our about 8 years ago. The 25th anniversary was an ideal opportunity to pop in the Blu-Ray Tommy got me for Christmas and finally share (he might say inflict) its majesty with him. Our roommates even joined us, and I had so much fucking fun watching them experience it for the first time...
Certainly we all know the hook of Face/Off, right? If you don’t, close this tab and go watch it. Go in blind. Trust me, it’ll be fun! But for those who want to know what’s going on, or need a quick reminder of what’s what .
Face/Off follows FBI special agent Sean Archer (John Travolta), whose young son is killed in the opening sequence by internatioinal terrorist Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) in a botched attempt on Archer’s life. Six years later and Archer has put Castor in a seemingly irreversible coma, and has only days to find a dirty bomb that will wipe out a mile of LA at a bare minimum. His only option is to utilize cutting edge medical tech and his own obsessive knowledge of Castor to swapping identities with the insane, comatose terrorist who killed his son, going into the prison where his brother Pollux (Alessandro Nivola) is being stored to learn where the bomb is and how to disarm it. Archer says his goodbyes to his wife Eve (Joan Allen) and daughter Jamie (Dominique Swain) without telling them the plot. Only a handful of FBI agents know the truth, and surely there’s no chance Castor will wake up, take Sean’s face, kill everyone who could verify his identity, and step into the man’s life right? Right????
As much as any discerning audience member will hear this premise and decide whether this is their kind of film or not, you simply cannot walk into Face/Off ready for the bombast, verve, and scalpel-like precision with which it puts itself over. We all know a Freejack or Johnny Mnemonic or what have you, a conceptually risky sci-fi actioner with a giddily amazing premise that’s blunted in some key way by unimaginative writing, inescapable budgetary limitations, directorial laziness, lame casting, or some hazardness combination of all these potential fault lines. Maybe these flaws have been recuperated as ersatz charm, or secret assets. Maybe its fandom is mostly ironic, or compulsory due to the talent involved. Face/Off is not that movie. The entertainment is genuine and freely offered. The story is as nutty as you’ve heard and more creatively explored than you’d guess.
John Woo’s directorial thumbprints are visible across every fluid camera movement, slowed-down edit, hyperbolically amped foley effect, and sick-ass jacket. Say what you will about the lugubriously paced cheese of Mission Impossible II, but with Face/Off (I can’t speak to his earlier Hollywood films) Woo transposes the action sensibilities that made him renown in China while escalating them in key ways. Face/Off is a “bigger” film than Hard Boiled in both style and scope, observing a more sprawling cast and following them through even wilder events with equal parts unabashed flair and real character investment. I want to really stress this second part, because the success of Face/Off as an actual character study is what still catches folks off guard when I show it to them. Sean Archer’s depression, his commitment, his desperation to restore his life and festering self-hatred as he walks in the body of his son’s killer is as upsetting to witness as anything I’ve ever seen in this genre. Mike Werb and Michael Colleary’s script charts how Sean and Castor explore and resent this new opportunity, playing in the sandbox of each other's lives opposite allies and loved ones who sense something is up, while very much wishing they were back in their own faces.
The winding construction of the plot, nutty concepts, and deep bench of interesting players are right there on the page, ready to intrigue no matter how pedestrian its direction might have been, but Woo's pop direction gives this real emotional heft, and the actors get to actually engage with their material. Cage takes top honors for playing the cartoony terrorist and the wounded, honest, evermore dismayed agent wearing his face with a purity of expression that deepens the whole film. The scale of his gestures and emotions is perfectly aligned with Woo’s excess, and he manages to add layers as the volume gets louder. Close on his heels is Joan Allen, giving a preternaturally grounded turn as the wife in the absolutely sad place of suspecting her husband’s newfound attention is a sign of some deeper wrong. I love that Allen is treated as such an apparent sex symbol here, and the fact that her plot revolves around not getting dickmatized is a novelty we just don’t see anymore. Both of these actors are tremendous together when Archer tries and succeeds in alerting his wife about the switcheroo.
Travolta’s not quite on their level in terms of depth, but he’s pretty fun once he gets to be the villain. Meanwhile, the likes of Gina Gershon, Alessandro Nivola, C.C.H. Pounder, Nick Cassavetes, John Carroll Lynch, Margaret Cho, and Thomas Jane flit around the edges of the picture, clicking so smoothly into their archetypes cliche barely matters.
Woo also gets roundly inspired work out of his craftspeople, all of whom are undoubtedly fulfilling his house style while helping him push those techniques in wilder, more propulsive gambits than ever before. Blockbuster mainstays cinematographer Oliver Wood and editors Christian Wagner and Steve Kemper reach new peaks of fluid, coherent motion. They ensure that the voluptuously unpredictable action is remarkably easy to follow, even when a dozen moving pieces are surging across any given battlefield, and they allow us to learn who these characters are through these ambushes and gunfights. Costume designer extraordinaire Ellen Mirojnik and set designers Steve Arnold and Garrett Lewis have more recognizable achievements among the cinephile set (go look them up!), and they ensure Face/Off looks cool as fuck at all times. The biggest of plaudits might belong to the sound team for balancing cool-guy gratuitousness, psychic dismay, and ripe emotionality, scaling their effects so expertly, and for making the sound of a boat crashing through another boat as viscerally felt as the plunger-like suction of a face being lifted clean off the sinew and bone.
My very favorite way of thinking about Face/Off is as a loose remake of Scorsese’s Cape Fear, where Max Cady tries to steal Sam Bowden’s life rather than annihilate it. Both films are overripe with cinematic excess, and prove unexpectedly canny at drawing out the complexities of its characters within so much self-conscious, self-sustaining bombast. Cape Fear makes more room than Face/Off for its darkest material - I don’t know that the predatorily incestuous tone of Travolta’s interactions with “his” daughter land as anything but lurid menace, but it’s a lone weird space in a film that otherwise nimbly explores how Sean and Castor swapping bodies has allowed them to test new possibilities for themselves, and how their loved ones and allies react to someone who is and isn’t the man they know. Hell, how well do these men even recognize themselves, let alone each other? The famous shot of them pointing their guns at each other, only to wind up looking right in the mirror, is just an inspired distillation of the whole film, especially because it blows up two seconds later.
So, tldr: I love Face/Off for being so ridiculously, expertly overripe in its action sequences without repeating rhythms or being hard to follow. I love how sharply major and minor players alike stride onscreen, and that it not just provides but explores such sturdy bedrocks of character psychology that it doesn’t feel embarrassing to use the word “psychology” in a movie where a guy flies a helicopter down onto the wings of a moving plane so it can’t take off. I love it as an early personal indicator that gonzo action films can have brainy narrative gambits. I love that this unexpectedly thoughtful film ends on the most psychologically regressive note it possibly could, where an aching loss gets its own switcheroo. I love it as a piece of art I’ve only watched with people I love, because having company is the most pleasurable way of absorbing its majesty. I love it as a petty cudgel against friends and terminally uncurious online weirdos I should care less about who don’t believe the bitch that put The Lost Daughter and Notturno on a top 10 list can have fun, even though Zola is right there too, and that pretentious fucks love having fun, actually.
And, of course, I love when they take the face off.