Director – John Woo – 1997 – US – Cert. 18 – 138m
*****
John Woo’s third US film, his strongest to date, has FBI agent John Travolta switching faces with villain Nic Cage – part of Art of Action, a major UK-wide season celebrating the artistry of real action choreography at cinemas across the UK October-November 2024
When screenwriters Mike Werb and Michael Colleary collaborated on original screenplay Face/Off, they had in mind such classic films as post-war gangster tale White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)and identity change outing Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966). Only after completing an initial draft did Colleary see a John Woo movie – The Killer (1989) – at which point he immediately knew the pair had found the perfect director for their material.
This was clearly reciprocal – if Woo had already astounded Hong Kong audiences with A Better Tomorrow (1986) and crossed over internationally with The Killer and Hard Boiled (1992), he had yet to win comparable critical acclaim in America, even though his modest budget American debut Hard Target (1993) had had its admirers and his first blockbusting actioner Broken Arrow (1996) had impressed Hollywood with its box office.
These films both felt like the work of a director for hire not an auteur, and while Woo, like numerous Hollywood immigrants before him, could probably have continued in similar vein, the Face/Off script contained exactly the elements the director needed to take up in Hollywood where he’d left off in Hong Kong.… Read the rest