THE QUEST FOR THE MOST ’90s FILM OF ALL TIME
Face/Off

I hate when people throw out this hypothetical scenario, but if you could only see one John Woo film, the one you pick should be Face/Off. He has done more daring, interesting, and better work, but his summer 1997 offering is the only one you need to see to truly understand who he is as a filmmaker. If the name John Woo is at all familiar to you, then you can picture his directorial style, which centers on highly-choreographed gun battles. These gun battles are introduced by the portent of doves flying away, and they involve two principals, usually with two guns each, whirling around and diving in dramatic fashion. Woo toggles between frame rates to spotlight their movements. Sometimes the men face each other in a Mexican stand-off, which suggests Woo’s favorite theme of the duality of man. He likes sparks too.

All of those trademarks were present in Woo’s Hong Kong films, but Face/Off is when they became both exaggerated and simplified to the point of self-parody. It’s as if all of Hollywood converged to offer Woo the perfect project, and then they filled it with hot air. Beginning with 1992’s Hard Target, America took an artist and gave him money until he became a hack. In a nutshell, they ’90sed him.

All of that idealistic bullshit aside though, Face/Off is awesome.

STARS/PERFORMANCES
- Actors Who Are Unquestionably Tied to the Decade- John Travolta and Nicolas Cage [+10]
The beautiful thing about Face/Off is that it offered something for everyone. The studio and producers felt they could deliver a by-the-numbers summer action blockbuster; John Woo thought he could explore the cop-and-criminal-are-two-sides-of-the-same-coin idea he interpreted in The Killer and Hard Boiled; Travolta and Cage could put on an acting clinic by swapping roles and impersonating each other.

This was at the end of Travolta’s mid-’90s comeback tour, when he was still challenging himself instead of taking parts based on how many jets he wanted to buy that year. As for Cage, he won an Oscar and, within the next year, starred in The Rock, Con-Air, and this on the road to going insane. So, within the same movie, you get one of Travolta’s last serious stabs at doing something interesting and one of Cage’s first stabs at being balls-out crazy.


Woo: “Oh, you mad ‘cuz I’m stylin’ on you?”

They’re both solid (To be fair, Travolta has the tougher assignment, forced to say hackneyed stuff like, “We’ll take a break when the case breaks!”) but Cage destroys Travolta in their scenes together. He seems more unhinged and dangerous as villain Castor Troy and more upright and innocent as hero Sean Archer. When the guy wants to, he can really turn it on. Conversely, Travolta’s special move in this movie is caressing people’s faces like a blind person. No, seriously. He does it four times.

- Other Notable Actors/Characters- [+10]
If you haven’t seen the movie in a while, part of the fun is picking out all of the recognizable faces popping up in tiny roles. Is that Danny Masterson? Is that Margaret Cho? Is that the dude who played Bunny on The Wire? Is that That Guy extraordinaire Chris Bauer? Paramount paid for a lot of people’s swimming pools in 1997.

More notably, Joan Allen, one of the best actresses on the planet, is the female lead. In three years she shot Nixon, The Crucible, The Ice Storm, Face/Off, and Pleasantville. Nice mid-’90s, Ms. Allen.


Actual Face Cage Makes in This Movie 1

TECHNOLOGY/CULTURAL RELICS
- Could the Plot Reasonably Occur with Current Technology?
No. This is a movie in which the two main characters swap faces, bodies, and voices in a medically preposterous procedure [+10]. And I don’t want to beat up on the premise; within the context of the film, you just have to buy it and move on. I’m not going to sit here and go: “Do they shave down Travolta’s wide shoulders? Do they straighten his spine to give him the same posture? Why is there no recovery period for a surgery that is too invasive to be possible?”

No, I’m fine with the idea behind the movie. If anything, I want there to be less explanation. What makes it patronizing and silly is the fact that the filmmakers try at all to sell us on this. It turns out that in 2010 we can actually mold ear tissue over the course of six weeks with stem cells. You know how they did it in 1997? Lasers. Oh, you didn’t know that lasers could create human ears out of thin air, fam? What did you, wander into this movie late because My Best Friend’s Wedding ran long?*

Similarly, the first problem you probably think of with this whole face-trading scenario is “Yeah, but how would they assume each other’s voices?” Good question, and the doctor in the movie answers it with: “I’ve implanted a microchip in your larynx.” Oh, okay. Microchips. [+3]

Microchips.

- Hacking/Computers
Does the term “Zip Drive” mean anything to you? [+3] Also, in the big prison escape scene, Archer somehow knows all of the computer shortcuts to open the doors and stuff. [+1] Does he have a mainframe to a top secret international prison at home to practice on? Finally, when Archer starts his computer, it says, “Greetings, Archer!” because computers do that [+1].

- Other Technological Notes
Cage uses a carphone—like the type that you carry around in a bag and plug into the cigarette lighter [+1]. People read newspapers as if it ain’t no thang [+1].

FASHION
Had Travolta’s character not had a Rebellious Teenage Daughter, who wears a leather jacket [+1] and an edgy nose-ring [+1], we would get a shut-out from this category. Everything else aged pretty well, except for Travolta’s bomber jackets [+1—another thing he has to get approved in a script—]. We’ll come back to the Rebellious Teenage Daughter, but I was also kind of comforted by her plain white cotton underpants [+1]. Even the rebellious kids weren’t rocking anything but plain white in the mid-’90s. Innocent times.


Actual Face Cage Makes in This Movie 2

’90s FILM CONVENTIONS
Character Talking to Himself [+1]
Flashback in Muted Colors [+1]
Shooting Things—in This Case, a Bottle of Acid—to Make Them Explode [+1]
Bombs Being Called “a Work of Art” [+1]
Nameless Henchmen [+3]

Rebellious Teenage Daughter [+5]- Dominique Swain plays Jamie, the R.T.D. We know she is rebellious because she wears a nose-ring, smokes, and replies to “Who are you supposed to be?” with “I’m supposed to be me.” In the final scene, we know that she’s no longer rebellious because she’s wearing jeans and smiling. Nothing adjusts you like finding out that your father put you in constant danger and that you unknowingly lived with a murderer.

Life-long Cop-Criminal Grudges [+5]- The movie opens with Sean Archer caressing his son’s face like a blind person, and Castor Troy, trying to shoot Archer, accidentally shoots his son. So for the next ten years, Sean Archer’s only mission—and apparently his only responsibility at the LAPD—is to take down Castor Troy. I get that. Someone killing your son would be a reason to hold a grudge and devote part of your life to tracking him down, especially if tracking down criminals is your job anyway. What I don’t understand is why Castor Troy would care at all about Sean Archer. The movie suggests a weird mutual respect that they have, but it also nails down that Troy is too much of a criminal overlord to even bother knowing who Archer is. I’ve seen the Cop-Criminal Grudge done worse, but I never like it.

Harping on the Fact That You Have Had Sex with the Wife of the Guy with Whom You Have Swapped Bodies [+10]- Just kidding. That’s not a cliche. But it is one of the nastier aspects of the film, and if you haven’t seen the movie in a while, you might have forgotten how much weight it holds as far as character development goes. But hey, you know what they say: It’s not cheating if you underwent a dangerous medical procedure to completely assume every aspect of another person’s body and personality!

OTHER

The biggest action set-piece of the film is when Sean Archer—as Castor Troy—escapes from a prison that is introduced with the description “We don’t adhere to the Geneva Convention. Interpol doesn’t know we exist.” As you can imagine, this situation requires some setup. See, this secret international prison is its own island, and all of the prisoners are locked into these clunky mechanical boots that have tracking devices; if the prisoners act up, the guards can activate magnets in the boots that nail the prisoners to the ground. And if the prisoners really act up, the guards can execute them without any kind of trial or checks and balances. As for the question of how people get sentenced to a prison so secret that even Interpol doesn’t know it exists, I didn’t see an explanation in the deleted scenes.

Anyway, Archer agrees to go into this place undercover—again, as Troy—and get information about where a bomb is stored. The problem is that the real Troy wakes up from his coma [+1] and kills everyone who has the intel that Archer is actually the guy in prison. Don’t you hate when that happens? So Archer has to escape of his own accord, which involves killing a lot of innocent people that we aren’t supposed to think about. This is his plan:
1. Purposefully get into a fight with a guard. Assume that people will overreact and decide to execute you.
2. Wait for guards to take off your magnet boots just before they execute you.
3. Enlist the aid of a prisoner you didn’t know was going to be there. (In the middle of his electrocution, this guy starts choking, and the guards unhook him from the chair. Because you know, you don’t want a guy you’re electrocuting to choke to death. So even though he has just been electrocuted within an inch of his life, he can still hold a conspiratorial conversation with Archer.)
4. Steal a guard’s gun and kill lots of innocent people to get to the computer room, where you punch in commands to open doors to the prison.
5. Run onto the top platform of the island prison, evading helicopter fire.
6. Jump a hundred feet into what we can assume are shark-infested waters.
7. Survive with no explanation or further elaboration on the film’s part.

If those events don’t deserve a [+10] for something, I’ll eat my hat swap bodies with my arch-nemesis and go undercover as him.

This movie is exhausting, but that’s why I love it so much. Woo’s antics earn a 71 on the scale, which puts it in the middle of the pack.

*- Because that’s what happened to me on June 21, 1997. I had to see if Cameron Diaz forgave Jules for secretly being in love with her fiance, you guys!