Face/Off is the film remembered as Hong Kong action director John Woo's first Hollywood feature. That's not actually true, he made Broken Arrow the year before, but that film is terrible and I've never managed to finish watching it. So this blog will uphold the revisionist history of Face/Off as an out of nowhere break out hit from a Hollywood outsider.
In Face/Off John Travolta and Nicolas Cage play characters that have their faces swapped to assume one another's identities. Travolta is an FBI, CIA, three letter agency anti terror type and Cage is a terrorist for hire, a job that was invented sometime before Die Hard. Quite who the cash rich, manpower poor terrorists are, what ideology they promote and how one advertises for freelance work in the sector, is never expounded on. The job really doesn't make sense and must have its genesis in a Time magazine article. Films use the terrorist for hire as the ultimate bad guy, he has no moral motivation, here only for financial gain. He will stop at nothing to get the job done, a business man of the murder trade. It's a quaint reflection of the modern world, going back 30 years to find ethically barren business types as the baddies, not the aspired to and celebrated leaders of the free world.
A normal critique of Face/Off is that it would be better if the roles were switched, if Travolta was the (overly whimsical) terrorist and Cage the determined FBI agent. Watching it this time, I'm not sure I agree. I think that Cage is just the better actor and he's better at being both characters. He has the range to be an unhinged maniac terrorist and a work obsessed FBI agent.
All action films end up with their main characters being amalgamations of several peoples performances. Stunt doubles and stand-ins take up more time on screen than you'd think. Some films assign two roles to their lead, like Bad Company, where Chris Rock plays an all star spy who gets murdered, then his long lost twin brother who replaces him, an all star idiot. That film is terrible, but that kinda thing can be great. Having two characters played by one actor, especially when you can tell which of the twins/clones/whatevers that actor is in the moment, is impressive. It's something that feels unique to the medium, you could do it in a video game, many Bethesda titles have single voice actors responsible for dozens of roles. They even lampoon themselves for it in Fallout 3 with Vault 108, The Gary Vault, where dozens of clones, Garys, have identical models and voice lines. But that is a slightly different thing. In film (and TV) it can feel like magic, a moment where disbelief is perfectly suspended.
Face/Off is sorta kinda two of these films in one, with each actor playing each part at one time or another. It's just that Cage is better at it. A few years later he would return to the duel role in Adaptation. where he plays the films real life screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his fictionalised twin brother, Donald Kaufman. It's clear he's just good at this, he contains multitudes. He did a similar thing in Kick-Ass, where he's fake Batman, fake Bruce Wayne and a real loving father. So I'm not alone in seeing it, other people cottoned on to one of the Face/Off faces being better at facing off.
There are themes and threads from The Phantom of the Opera, Beauty and the Beast, things of that ilk. Here the disfigurement is your husband being transformed into Nick Cage, a visage of the man who killed your son. That character, the FBI guy, is torn apart by seeing this face in the mirror and polluted by its true owners lifestyle. Which is indeed the plot of a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror speical that aired the next year, but that's besides the point.
Much of John Woo's style is in the gunfight. His are loud, explosive, full of people jumping though the air shooting at least one firearm. Shotguns blow off chunks of the set and set the air alight. It's super stylised, nail biting and dangerous, everyone feels at risk from a stray round. In reality it's a lot of stunt doubles being shot multiple times in slightly different costumes, the main cast can only be harmed by special guns fired by special bad guys. Parts of Face/Off serve as a rapid fire revisit to Woo's greatest hits, the previous heights of his Hong Kong action filmmaking career. There are slow motion shots of doves, a massive shoot out in a church and generally a predisposition to play with Catholic imagery. There's just so much of the director in this film, so many reflections of who he was before and hints as to how Hollywood will adopt, then change his style.
There's this moment where the film comes together, where style and themes meet perfectly. Cage and Travolta face off, pointing guns directly at one another though a mirror. They're aimed at their own reflections, ones that more accurately reflect the visage of their enemy than the face swapped bodies they currently live in. They shoot, each dodges the others bullet (this is possible don't worry about it) and they dive back into a protracted gunfight. Everything is aligned, if you had to do a 60 second super cut of the film, you'd just use this scene.
Well now we've faced off, I must head off and try to fix my computer, which is not acting like itself. I suspect a complex plot involving military surgeons and terrorists for hire (the CIA)