Face/Off

    365 Films

Entry #129

Face/Off (1997)

Directed by John Woo

With the ascension of Nicolas Cage in the internet laughing stock portion of his career, Face/Off has unfortunately devolved into the realm of camp for some.  Don’t get me wrong; I can’t argue that some of the most preposterous things about this movie aren’t inherently funny but I will stand by the eerily committed performances of John Travolta and Mr. Cage in this film.  They invest what could have been an actor’s goof with equal parts demented glee and tortured melancholy.  As the years have passed my favorite moments in the film have tended to drift from the action sequences towards the scenes each actor has with Joan Allen (who really deserved some kind of year end recognition for her work).  Just watch her work as she comes to grips with the idea that the men now claiming to be her husband is now wearing the skin of the man who murdered her son, she’s astonishing.  In the annals of Face/Off lore it has been related that the original screenplay for Face/Off was in a much more science fiction register.  If memory serves, it originally took place in the future and the ground breaking surgical procedure at the heart of the film took center stage.  When director John Woo came on board, he wisely discarded those genre elements and decided to pursue a vision that is about as close to a character driven action film as we are ever likely to get.  If you think about it, the “plot” of Face/Off, the reason for which Archer initially goes undercover as is solved about an hour into the picture, and by the villainous Troy no less!  The rest of the film essentially consists of a what-if scenario posing the mind-boggling question of what would your worst enemy attempt with your body?  Face/Off is Woo’s best American film by a walk and the integral reason for that is because it carries over a lot of the philosophical thematic obsessions that marked his great Hong Kong films like The Killer and Hard Boiled.  Woo has always been a director who traffics in big, bold, and underlined melodrama.  He has never kept his love of old Hollywood musicals a big secret by any stretch of the imagination.  Sometimes these tendencies get the better of him with the overblown World War II weepie Windtalkers (a film that’s not entirely without merit by the way) and the ugly cousin of Face/Off known as Paycheck (a perfect example of a Sci-Fi premise run amok).  With Face/Off he was able to find the sweet spot between the visual splendor of his action sequences and the Melville-esque brooding of his police and gangster characters.  The result is a rousing action spectacle that never forgets the complicated human beings at its center.  When is the last time an action movie co-existed with a blistering vivisection of a marriage in the same film?  Face/Off.  That’s when.