#14 — Face/Off
This is part of an illustrated countdown of my 49 1/2 most essential action films. Last week I talked about an ice skater that has had a profound impact on my life, personally — someone with a PhD in philosophy, physics, and killing vampires. Blade.
I’m not sure where to start with this one. I’ll begin with a toast to our dear friend, Nicholas National Treasure Coppola Cage — who I consider to be a genius and one of the most unsuspecting-yet-important action heroes of the 90s. In fact, all three of his entries on this countdown were released within a 2 year time frame. The Rock, and Con Air, and Face/Off, oh my. He’s also wildly different in each film.
Face/Off is my personal favorite of the three, blending the serious and silly into a third element that, like the main characters, is the best of both at the same time. This completes the holy trinity of Action Cage. These characters feel like extensions of the CAEU (Con Air Expanded Universe), and director John Woo treats the insane plotting with the respect it deserves.
Nobody involved in the making of this movie seems afraid of getting a little nuts. Like, Michael Keaton nuts. I actually saw this movie for the first time a couple years ago and was agog at the how ready to party it is from the opening tip. Take the relationship between super agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) and super-criminal Castor Troy (Cage). The first act crams in an entire anime series’ worth of bad blood between these two, starting with an assassination attempt that inadvertently kills Archer’s little boy, Michael (while riding a merry-go-round, of all things), after the bullet passes through Archer’s body. This sets off an obsession with bringing him to justice, flash-forwarding to Archer brooding in his FBI office set to choir music.
By this point, Troy has planted a bomb in a convention center while cosplaying Sister Act, and scurries off to a private plane for his third visually distinct appearance within the first 15 minutes — now a slickly dressed gangster with matching, gold-plated pistols and slow motion effects when he walks. He also has a criminal mastermind brother named Pollux and they joke with each other about how bad they’ve been, or are planning to be in the near future. Real delinquents. An enormous airport confrontation with Archer and his men takes all the big Hollywood muscle of Bad Boys and Con Air and adds that extra layer of personal conflict between two guys that like to dual wield, roll on the ground while they shoot, and lean up against cover while conversing with each other. This eventually results in Troy being blasted by a jet engine and put in a coma, but without the location of the bomb being disclosed.
I don’t want to get too bogged down in plot stuff, though. The best thing about Face/Off is the premise. There’s been body-swap comedies, but nobody was smart enough to do a body-swap action movie, until now. When an action cop wants his man so bad it’s like acid in his mouth, he sometimes agrees to bad ideas — like an unsupervised, off-the-books face transplant with his arch enemy so he can convince Troy’s criminal mastermind brother to reveal the location of the aforementioned bombs. It’s a Mission Impossible task bound to go wrong, and it hilariously does — continuing with blistering momentum what I believe to be one of the greatest first hours of action cinema.
The unexpected sci-fi elements really make this one unique. It’s also a perfect title for an action movie. It’s a face-off where the faces come off, and a battle between hero and villain where both must experience the other’s life (which consequently, includes the actors). The surgery scene dives into the gory details with a hint of campiness and some pretty good practical fx to sell the idea, as ludicrous as it is. Once Cage transitions into Castor Troy as Sean Archer, he gets dumped into a black site prison where the inmates are all equipped with magnetized boots to keep them from causing too much damage. Again, just the right amount of wacky.
In the middle of all this madness, you might forget that the director of The Killer and Hard Boiled is guiding the ship, and finding unusual ways to add all his little Woo-isms. I think this movie should expand folks’ idea of what that actually means. It’s not just the heroic bloodshed of Chow Fun Fat shedding tears and bullets through a backdrop of angelic doves (although the birds are plentiful), but he can handle comedy as well.
After the titular switcheroo goes south, Travolta, playing Castor Troy disguised as Sean Archer, meets the real Archer in prison to gloat. This is one of the funniest, most entertaining movie scenes I have ever seen in my entire life. It almost hurts the second act for not being able to live up to it. It’s not just the amazingly hammy, body-swapped performances — but also the melodramatic use of flashback to reveal how Archer’s plan was foiled, and the Joker-like histrionics from Travolta as Cage whimpers like a heart-broken grandma. The editing and tone remind me of Sam Raimi’s Darkman, and how he deftly balances off-the-wall humor with more serious character conflict. During this opening act of filmmaking, it feels like anything can happen.
“It’s like looking in a mirror, only…not.”
So it starts about a man trying to bring a super-villain to justice, then morphs into a dramatic thriller about getting his stolen life back. John Woo cares about family values, he doesn’t want this to just be non-stop action copping at the expense of the Archer family’s emotional needs. But he’s also gonna be weird about it, so people will pet each other’s faces to say “I love you”. Somewhere along my rewatch, I got caught up in the magnificence of a speedboat exploding through the body of another boat, and I must have lost count of the number of face pets. But if I had to guess, it’s something like eight instances of one person petting the face of another. This is a lot of love to go around.
It ends with Archer getting his face back on, and adopting a boy named Adam, the son of his now-dead arch nemesis. This is a bizarre, but sweet revelation to me, because I definitely think Archer sees him as an avatar for his dead son — but it’s also something of an act of redemption. Archer is fulfilling the promise of Troy’s now-dead girlfriend Eve by taking care of him, and his teenage daughter welcomes the boy to the family with a face pet, just to show him how we do things around here.
One weird side effect of being so late to the Face/Off party (I saw this for the first time a couple years ago) is realizing how much of Cage’s vast memeography comes directly from this film. He has a whole gallery of faces here that some of you undoubtedly posted to feed your dopamine addiction when Souperman69 started mouthing off in the comment section. An iconic shrug, insane laughter, choir boy antics. I think normally this would take you out of the experience, but I found it to be quite entertaining. In a small way, we are all Face/Off. This movie is unforgettable.
