In order to catch him, he must become him.
Los Angeles FBI agent Sean Archer, investigating a sociopath crime-lord (one Castor Troy), watches as his own son takes an assassin’s bullet that was actually meant for himself – fired by that very same crime-lord. With his life now mostly destroyed, Archer becomes obsessed with finally putting an end to Troy’s career of terrorism and espionage. Meanwhile, on the home front, Archer’s daughter begins to act out, and his wife doesn’t know how to talk to him. He snaps in anger at his investigatory team and finds no joy in pretty much any aspect of life. But finally, Archer and Troy eventually cross paths, and after an intense and dramatic confrontation at an airport hangar, the evil-minded genius and his brother are caught, with the former ending up in a coma and the latter in a maximum security prison. But with the brothers’ nefarious plot, which includes a ton of explosives, still poised to happen, Archer agrees to a highly experimental procedure in which he will switch faces with that of his arch nemesis in order to mine for information from his enemy’s brother and no one except for the three people doing the actual procedure will know who he really is and that includes his own family because why the fuck not? It sounds like a really good and low-stakes idea. But after the comatose Troy awakens to see that his face has been taken, and that there’s this other spare face floating around in this futuristic fish bowl, Troy takes a page out of Archer’s book and begins to infiltrate his dogged pursuer’s life with his new face, teaching Archer’s daughter how to stab, his wife how to sex, his boss how to die just by screaming at him, and everyone else just how much fun he is. With Archer and Troy now Troy and Archer, their pseudo-lives collide in a majestic art-installation of bullets, doves, and blowing, flapping, slow-motion coats. It’s awesome.
Man...Face/Off. Only in the ’90s did this sound like a good idea. And it not only sounded like a good idea, but it was a good idea. Following Nicolas Cage’s much-deserved Oscar win for his role in Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Hollywood did what it does: took advantage of his new spotlight and put him in nonsense very antithetical to his Oscar-winning performance, and he suddenly and inexplicably found himself the go-to action leading man. He would go on to star, back-to-back, in the holy Cage action trifecta of The Rock (1996), Con Air (1997), and Face/Off., Not only were these two of the best consecutive years in action history, it would turn out Cage had saved the best for last. And because this is a John Woo flick, you’re going to get all the doves, eye close-ups, and post-production slow motion you can stand. But that’s not all: John Travolta hams it up, Nicolas Cage whirls around while shooting for NO REASON, Gina Gershon uncharacteristically does not remove her clothes, and we get cameos from Tommy Flanagan, John Carroll Lynch, Thomas Jane, and Joe Bob Fuckin' Briggs. And it’s all glorious.
Face/Off is madness. For over two hours, the plot will be ludicrous, the performances will be cartoonish, and the action will be brutal and unending. Nothing about Face/Off should work. Not one executive in Hollywood should have finished a meeting that began with, “Okay, so, a good guy and a bad guy SWITCH FACES.” An Oscar-winner and a two-time Oscar-nominee should not have been spotted anyhere near this script, this concept, this unbelievable cacophony of cinematic insanity. But my god, it happened – somehow it all came together. Face/Off got the green light, it got the proven director, it got the legendary cast. It soon existed; it became a thing; the action genre hasn’t been the same since.
THE GOOD GUY(S)(?)
ON LEFT: Sean Archer. Mourning father. Distant husband. Ass-bug-infested member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Superior to The Wire's Bunny Colvin. Obsessed with catching the man indirectly responsible for the death of his son. Looks a lot like a corpse when under medical anesthesia.
Within the confines of the very eclectic dichotomy that Face/Off presents, Nicolas Cage is essentially playing two entirely different roles, though one would be considered his primary and the other his secondary. Once Cage picks up where Travolta left off, his layered and extremely interesting performance builds off the rather surprisingly philosophical foundation that is inexplicably present in this very stupid action film (the one that includes a speedboat-chase finale): that for a large portion of the running time, both men – prominent actors – are actually satirizing the art of acting into their own performances; i.e., actors are playing the part of two men playing a part. Going further, when it comes to Cage’s performance, he is playing a man who is still deeply hurting from the loss of his son – a hurt so deep that he’s inadvertently isolated himself from everyone around him – but he still has to find a way to act through that pain in order to successfully play the role of the life-loving carefree Castor Troy. It’s evident in the scene where Archer’s version of Troy is in the midst of a prison riot, and in between laughing uproariously and bellowing “I’m Castor Troy!” he is actually sobbing; or later, in Troy’s pad surrounded by his crime family, someone asks him how he knows so much about Sean Archer, so he confesses, “I sleep with his wife.” And as everyone around him laughs, and though Cage is laughing, too, he's just as conflicted about it as he seems genuinely amused by the irony. That right there is a perfect summation of the interesting parallelisms that Face/Off presents: whether Archer is himself, or masquerading as Castor Troy, he’s always acting like a man who is okay, and he’s not.
ON RIGHT: Uh…Sean Archer, also. Kind of. Sometimes. Everything character-based above applies. Especially the corpse thing.
In a film where there are two lead roles but still four major performances, sadly, one of those performances by one of those lead actors was going to end up being the weakest, and that dishonor falls to John Travolta’s take on Sean Archer. To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with his version of “the good guy” – it’s just that compared to Cage’s typically more-manic performances, or even when Travolta is up against his own take on Castor Troy, this version of Archer has little to do beyond walk around, look haunted, and shout at Margaret Cho. He does have a scene or two where he gets to offer some dynamism, but for the most part he just seems like that tight-ass at the office who is really wound up and abrupt. It’s okay though, because there’s only so much insanity one film can take before it ends up becoming something you watch in a film theory course, and so Travolta allows himself to play it low-key, knowing that it’s going to make his major transition from hero to villain that much more jarring and effective and a hell of a lot of fun.
THE BAD GUY(S)(!)
ON TOP: Castor Troy, fraternal twin brother of Pollox. Explosives enthusiast. Eater of peaches. Deviant of sexuality. Dove-flock-be’er-arounder.
Between his weird gay masseuse rumors, his awful career choices over the last twenty years, his controversial religion, and his delightful head-stuttering “Adele Dazeem” boner from that one year’s Oscars ceremony, John Travolta’s credibility has plummeted significantly – especially compared to his heyday when he was one of the most dependable and sought-after performers in Hollywood; he was handsome, energetic, professional, and kind. Because of that, it’s easy to forget just how fun he was capable of being. And speaking of fun, no one is having more of it than he is as Castor Troy. Though he has very little villainous screen-time in his career (he played another notable antagonist in John Woo’s Broken Arrow [1996]), he seemed to enjoy going for broke here, because there’s not one piece of scenery left unchewed by his unhinged, almost operatic performance. Whatever low levels to which his career has sadly devolved, Travolta will always be one cool-ass, cigarette-smoking, jazz-step dancing motherfucker.
ON BOTTOM: Uh…Castroy Troy, also. Shit.
Nicolas Cage, I have a question: where the fuck did this version of you go? What happened to the guy who used to utterly transform with his performances that he actually made audiences squirm in their seats while also delighting an entire generation of Youtubers?
Though Cage begins the film as the villain before becoming the hero, boy, during the time when he’s actually Castor Troy in both mind and body, it is a thing to behold. From gaping mouths to flamboyant delivery, Cage is all over this role with relish. It’s almost a shame that the switcheroo-based Face/Off hadn’t actually done its own switcheroo behind the scenes and switched the two leading men’s roles, so that Cage could have instead spent the majority of his screentime as the villain. Although at a running time of nearly 2.5 hours, perhaps that’s just too much Cage insanity for one film. (Having read that back, yeah, that’s a dumb thing to say.) Face/Off isn’t even out of the opening credits sequence and Cage is already hamming it up as a priest, head-banging to “Hallelujah” and grabbing the ass of a certainly underage choir singer. Once you stop to realize that Cage’s priest outfit has NOTHING to do with the plot, you will realize two things: Castor Troy is a maniac and Face/Off is incredible.
THE CASUALTIES
No tally for good guys versus bad guys because give me a break – YOU try categorizing who counts as good guys and bad guys when the good guys and bad guys switch natures back and forth. Overall, there are 33 shootings, 3 dead by conflagration, 2 dead by various body trauma, one dead via harpoon gun, and one dead by a “whoopsie!” sniper’s bullet.
THE BEST KILL
Troy gets things going by shooting an undercover FBI agent in the gut who was pretending to be a stewardess, after of course he posited to her: “If I let you suck my tongue, would you be grateful?” Following this rather bloodthirsty execution, Troy looks at arch nemesis Sean Archer and shrugs in a manner of which Larry Fine would have been immensely proud.
THE DAMAGE
Sean Archer: an off-the-mark bullet through the shoulder intended for him, but which ends up in his son. Talk about a hole in two! He also undergoes: multiple prison fights; a bullet to the shoulder by his real daughter; major back and belly flops; a drop through a glass ceiling and a shard of glass into his side; an exploding speedboat blowing him onto shore; and several sucker-punches and body-hits with various metal pipes.
Castor Troy: a jet turbine slams him into Comaland; stabbed in the thigh by his fake daughter; his own glass-ceiling plummet and speedboat explosion; a pretty nasty and spiteful self-inflicted face-cutting; stabbed in leg with harpoon; and that same harpoon driven into his belly.
THE BAD GUY’S COMEUPPANCE
Only in Hollywood could Sean Archer and Castor Troy still be standing by film’s end, so when John Travolta finally meets his long-overdue harpoon, the audience gratefully lets out a collective sigh of relief, because based on the sheer amount of shoot-outs and chase scenes and explosions and broken glass already witnessed, they’ve been watching this film for, in John Woo time, the last nine years.
THE LINE
“I’d like to take his face…………………………………………………………………..off.”
“Dress up like Halloween, and ghouls will try to get in your pants.”
“DIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
THE VERDICT
In some ways, action cinema died a little on the day Face/Off was released in theaters all the way back in the realm of 1997. Not since then, in spite of all the giant robots and leather-clad dominatrix prostitutes and all the winking/nudging aimed at the camera, has an action film of such sheer gonzo appeal, massive entertainment value, and littered with career-high watermark performances hit theaters. Sadly, John Woo’s American career wouldn’t last much longer, as he would go on to make the critical and box-office disappointment Windtalkers (2002) before hightailing it back to his native China to make more serious-minded films.
Face/Off is bombastically stupid. But it’s also harmlessly and relentlessly entertaining. John Woo has thrown everything at the wall to see what sticks, and he does so with a praiseworthy Billy Mumphrey level of cockeyed optimism. The good news is...everything sticks. But there’s still one little niggling thought that has the potential to fester in the far corner of more learned action-film-fans’ minds whenever they sit down for an annual viewing. And it’s the notion that Face/Off's script had been knocking around Hollywood desks for years and years before it was finally greenlit…and at one point, instead of Cage and Travolta, it saw the potential first on-screen pairing of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. (Yeah, that slight quiver you just felt in your pants? That’s exactly what this column is all about.) What that signifies is that the importance of the casting for these two roles had been a major selling point since the minute this project caught someone’s eye, and even though taking Face/Off as we know it and implanting those two action megastars into either role, whether they were playing hero and then villain or villain and then hero, would have been the stuff of cinematic heart attack, the Face/Off that eventually came to be is just too good to sacrifice – for anything, or anyone.
