Face/Off is Still The Craziest Action Film of Its Era

This article comes from Den of Geek UK.

One of the great pleasures of following genre cinema is the long, enduring onscreen conversation that’s taken place between movie directors from the East and the West. It’s a creative push and pull which has resulted in some of the most boundary-pushing, inventive and important films ever made. When Akira Kurosawa wrote The Hidden Fortress, an airy homage to the John Ford Westerns he loved so much, he couldn’t predict its rollicking adventuring would be re-interpreted and sent into space by George Lucas to form the basis of the most successful film franchise in history via Star Wars. Similarly, when Ringo Lam took the tropes of ’70s Eurocrime and American gangster movies of the ’30s and ’40s, and upped the machismo and stylized violence quotient to insane levels with 1987’s City on Fire, he probably didn’t anticipate that film being ruthlessly pilloried to form the basis of Reservoir Dogs, the movie that properly introduced Quentin Tarantino to the world and revolutionized independent filmmaking in the ’90s.

Despite this tradition of ideas being respectfully rallied back and forth across the Pacific, there are very few directors who actually got to ply their trade successfully on both sides of it. Of this select group, it’s arguably John Woo, who along with Lam was the founding father of Hong Kong’s celebrated ‘heroic bloodshed’ genre, that had the most interesting career. One that’s allowed him to undoubtedly earned his place in movie history as one of the greatest action movie directors of all time.

But while critics and movie historians will (rightly) concentrate on Woo’s staggering late ’80s/early ’90s Hong Kong work when writing the book on action cinema, 1997’s Face/Off is by far and away his most interesting American film, and the point where the tension between the Eastern and Western influences in his movies finally exploded into a unique, satisfying mess.

Woo had worked on two Hollywood movies before Face/Off: 1993’s Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target and 1996’s Broken Arrow, a fun but formulaic chase thriller that is probably best remembered now for inadvertently giving birth, for better or worse, to Ain’t It Cool News. Neither film is without its low-rent charms, but they were both classed as serious disappointments after the likes of The Killer and Hard Boiled, whose achingly beautiful slo-mo sledgehammer symbolism ,and furiously choreographed violence, felt epochal for action movies in the ’90s.

After the commercial success of Broken Arrow, however, Woo was trusted to impart a little more of his trademark flair on proceedings with Face/Off. On top of this, he also received several gifts in the form of a higher budget, a deceptively smart script, and two of the least inhibited actors in Hollywood.

In a tale not so much high-concept as I-can’t-feel-my-face concept, John Travolta’s tortured FBI agent Sean Archer has been engaged in a battle of wits with demented pervert terrorist Caster Troy (Nicolas Cage) for many years. This is after Troy inadvertently murdered Archer’s young son in an assassination attempt gone wrong during the movie’s opening credits. The conflict looks to be over though once Archer puts Troy in a coma, but then the revelation of a catastrophically huge bomb buried somewhere in Los Angeles leads Archer to make the questionable decision to undergo experimental surgery and have Troy’s face appended to his, so he can go seamlessly undercover as the criminal mastermind and root out the location of the bomb from Troy’s cohorts. Of course it’s not long before Troy wakes up from his coma, steals Archer’s face for himself, and all hell breaks loose.

Most cat-and-mouse detective stories have fun with the well-worn cliché that cop and criminal aren’t so different after all. But like every single aspect of Face/Off’s production, there is little room for subtlety and suggestion, so what is usually subtext gets ripped out from under the floorboards and painted on the walls in block capitals.

Somehow it works, because after the initial exposition scenes (which are dealt with so perfunctorily and quickly as to almost be apologetic) this lunatic conceit is explored in a series of ways that are at worst dramatically interesting and at best genuinely clever. One of the key things that separates Face/Off from its Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay contemporaries is its interest in its characters. While the action set-pieces are fantastic, the bulk of the film is spent exploring the consequences of the face swap either through Freaky Friday fish-out-of-water comedy (Troy as Archer teaching his daughter how to shiv a groping boyfriend) or Kafka-esque existential horror (Archer as Troy realizing he’s trapped in prison as his nemesis sleeps with his wife).

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It’s this sly and knowing air that permeates the script and makes the film feel more akin to something by the king of high-concept action sci-fi, Paul Verhoeven, albeit one that replaces the piercing satire with hysterical family psychodrama. And despite appearances, this is a sci-fi film, complete with an elongated set-piece in an elaborate, dystopian prison replete with convicts wearing magnetic boots, although its fantastical elements are deliberately played down. In fact, Woo’s major contribution to the script was to strip it of its futuristic setting, arguing that if the filmmakers did their job properly, audiences would buy into the central concept without requiring the caveat that it be set in a far flung dystopia.

He was proven right, and setting it in the present day also allowed Woo to reach into his formidable box of tricks from the heroic bloodshed genre, bringing them to American audiences for the first time. It’s almost as if Woo knew this would be his one chance to truly work the style he had pioneered into an American film, and he doesn’t waste any time getting everyone up to speed.

You don’t need to watch more than 10 minutes of Face/Off to realize that this is a John Woo joint. In that time you get the balletic, swan-diving, double-wielding pistol gunplay that was his trademark (at least until it was co-opted by The Matrix and the popular Max Payne game series); a slo-mo billowing cape as Cage’s lunatic villain emerges from a limo smoking a cigarette; faces exploded by bullets; shotgun blasts sending anonymous goons 10 feet in the air; and a diegetic, thunderously operatic hymnal soundtrack being belted out by an actual church choir. He does show some restraint by holding back the fluttering doves, church shootouts, hospital gurneys used as weapons, and Mexican stand-offs until the end of the movie, but that’s about it.

Crucially though, it doesn’t feel like a cynical John Woo greatest hits, as his bombastic use of religious symbolism and operatic violence is a perfect fit for all the melodrama. And of course, he’s matched beat-for-beat for maximalist excess by his two leads, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta.

Both actors were scalding hot properties at the time: Cage was fresh off the release of action mega hits The Rock and Con Air, and had a decent claim to being the most popular action movie star in the world. Travolta, meanwhile, was still riding high on the wave of his mid-’90s comeback via Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty, and was a credible A-list leading man in his own right.

To watch Face/Off is to be reminded that the ’90s was the decade where the line between what was considered a good performance and frenzied overacting blurred. Considerably. The decade began with Antony Hopkins winning the Best Actor Oscar for his pantomime Hannibal Lecter, and at some point during it, Jim Carrey became the world’s highest paid film star, which should give you some idea of which way the wind was blowing. Now in enlightened 2019, the trend in cinema leans further back again toward understatement, so it’s a shock to see these two flail, scream, and gurn through the film’s two hour plus running time as if they are in fact genuinely trying to act their way out of a series of increasingly sturdy paper bags.

Of the two performances, it’s funny to think that Travolta’s is the more understated, as it is still clearly a deranged exercise in rampant scenery-chewing. That said, it’s still a decent performance: he has the harder job of the two, as he spends the bulk of a film as a bad guy trying to act like a good guy, which requires just a fraction more subtlety than his counterpart.

As for Cage, I’d hesitate to call his performance as Caster Troy good, but it is certainly impressive in terms of balls out insanity. There are moments here–Troy prancing around in a dog collar groping choir girls, Caster-as-Troy tearfully starting a prison riot, Caster-as-Troy tripping balls in front of a mirror–that are hilariously terrifying or terrifyingly hilarious. It begins to feel like you’re witnessing a genuine psychotic break, and Woo just happened to be filming at the time. On the one hand, actors are so rarely permitted to go this big that it is genuinely thrilling; on the other, you realize this is the point where Cage began his transformation from charismatic quirky action hero to full blown meme, even though The Wicker Man was still a few years away yet.

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Perhaps Cage being a punchline now is part of the reason why Face/Off’s reputation seems to be diminished somewhat–it’s never mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Die Hard, Robocop, The Matrix, Batman Begins, or Mad Max: Fury Road, as one of the more interesting, boundary pushing and enjoyable big budget Hollywood actioners. Cage’s reputation was to nose-dive soon after, following a string of cynically horrible films, and Travolta is only just about recovered from the debacle of 2000’s Battlefield Earth, the colossal Scientology flop which nearly ended his career for good. Equally, Woo’s Hollywood output returned to being disappointingly formulaic following the release of Face/Off, and he soon returned to Hong Kong to make a series of worthy but unremarkable wuxia films.

But Face/Off deserves to be revisited, and not only because, unlike a lot of its contemporaries, it eschews using the early period CGI that is all-but-unwatchable today, and has therefore aged considerably better. It should be revisited because it’s a piece of work that seamlessly blends its disparate reference points–high-concept sci-fi, family psychodrama, Hong Kong heroic bloodshed, police thrillers, prison movies, Cronenbergian body horror–into something gloriously strange. And it somehow holds together as something that earns your emotional investment and attention, despite its up-to-11 chaos constantly threatening to vibrate the whole enterprise out of control. It’s so original and enjoyable that it’s only a matter of time before Hollywood remakes it with some famous Chrises in the lead roles–it’s surprising they haven’t already.

If Hollywood does choose to flog this particular horse though, they shouldn’t bother with the remake, and just give us the sequel with the aging Travolta, Cage, and Woo all reprising their roles. Get that insane band back together, and show these mumbling noughties kids how to really make an action film. This trend for the understated can’t last forever. And when it does end, we’ll know just who to call.