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.
Although its neo‑science-fictional premise (two men exchange faces in a literal face off) is wildly different to anything in Woo’s Hong Kong canon, the underlying (and indeed eponymous) theme of two adversaries bound together by their conflict with one another, their other literal face off, is in tune with ideas already explored in The Killer and Hard Boiled.
Perhaps because of his Hong Kong industry background, Woo doesn’t worry about the inherent silliness and implausibility of the basic premise (the requisite amount of surgically removed facial gore effects is present to make the device work, but no more) but concentrates instead on his two facing off leading men and their nearest and dearest.
As his leads, Woo casts two contemporary cinematic icons – Nicolas Cage and Broken Arrow‘s John Travolta as master criminal and top FBI agent respectively. At the opening, criminal Cage, concealed as a sniper, shoots the young son of Travolta FBI on a fairground carousel, giving the FBI man cause to hunt him down.
Amidst the ensuing string of action set pieces, Travolta FBI is given criminal Cage’s face to become Cage playing Travolta FBI sent undercover into prison to question criminal Cage’s incarcerated brother Alessandro Nivola. When criminal Cage finds out, he steals Travolta FBI’s face to become Travolta playing criminal Cage, destroying all evidence of both surgical trickery and undercover operation to hide both men’s real identities.
Now Cage playing Travolta FBI is trapped in prison with everyone else believing he belongs there, while Travolta playing criminal Cage is free to conduct FBI operations against himself. Both men thus infiltrate the other’s lives – Travolta playing criminal Cage eyeballs the FBI man’s teenaged daughter Dominique Swain (he slyly utters the legend, “poppa’s got a brand-new bag” in her presence) and sleeps with his wife Joan Allen; Cage playing Travolta FBI treats Cage’s girlfriend Gina Gershon (and child) with considerably more respect than she’s been hitherto accustomed to as a hard-boiled single mother.
As shoot out follows shoot out in seemingly endless succession, the whole thing is choreographed on a bigger scale than any of Woo’s Hong Kong movies (even Hard Boiled). Infusing the logic of the Hong Kong movie with Hollywood stars and state-of-the-art production values, Face/Off jettisons the dubious superrealism of the Hollywood actioner, where to hold the audience’s attention every element must make logical sense no matter how ridiculous, in favour of the Hong Kong movie’s go for it approach where any elements likely to hold the audience attention are thrown into the mix, never mind realism.
More importantly, what Face/Off possesses that Woo’s two prior American outings lack is a metaphor that works in the American idiom… or rather two metaphors: ultimately this is concerned as much with family (a theme Woo touched on in the Ti Lung / Leslie Cheung / Emily Chu subplot of A Better Tomorrow) as with two loners facing off. Woo has made nothing comparable to Face/Off in the US since; it currently stands as his one truly great Hollywood movie.
Face/Off plays as 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.
Trailer:
Season Trailer: