Face/Off (1997)

How ridiculous is Face/Off?! I saw this for the first time on Friday night, and I think it has one of the most ludicrous plots I've ever seen, but I enjoyed it in spite of this. John Woo's action is always pretty spectacular (I need to watch Broken Arrow again!) and having Nicholas Cage in any action movie usually promises something bonkers. 

So John Travolta plays CIA/FBI(?) agent Sean Archer out to catch the murderer of his young son, namely Nic Cage's stupidly monikered villain Castor Troy (who has a brother named Pollux Troy, a name which is impossible to take seriously). After a manic gun battle in the first 15 minutes, Castor is incapacitated. It then turns out that in order to get Pollux to confess the location of a bomb, the best course of action is for Archer to have his face removed and replaced with Castor's... I'll run that by you again - John Travolta's face is to be lasered off, and Nic Cage's is to be put back on, and then after a bit of lipo and such like, voilá, Sean Archer now looks like Castor Troy. 

The biggest conceit of the movie, the face/off, is also the hardest piece of plotting to swallow. I've seen photos of the woman who recently had the world's first face transplant, and to put it nicely, she wasn't pretty. And this was after numerous operations and many months work. Face/Off asks you to believe that pudgy John Travolta can be operated on to become slim Nic Cage over night. And then it asks you to believe that Nic Cage's faceless bad guy awakes from his coma, then gets Travolta's face put on, again over night, with no scarring at all (other than the face itching a bit!). So far so ridiculous. The face thing is about doable, but the fact that Cage and Travolta have such different body shapes is harder to get around - Troy in Archer's body sleeps with Archer's wife... Surely she might have noticed some intimate details that were different? Or did the doctors match the pair cock for cock?! 

The ludicrousness of these plot points doesn't seem to be lost on the script or actors who occasionally can't believe what they're explaining or witnessing. HOWEVER... As a fun, funny, and balls-out enjoyable action caper, this film works. And it works on the strengths of Nic Cage and John Travolta playing John Travolta and Nic Cage respectively. Travolta's character is much more interesting when he's playing the out-of-his-mind villain, and Nic Cage tones everything down wonderfully to play Sean Archer's frustrated obsessive agent. 

Face/Off fits in a genre of film that seemed prevalent in the 80's and 90's that isn't around much anymore - that of the mindless shoot 'em up. I can't remember a film of recent years (other than the hilarious Shoot 'Em Up itself, and Hot Fuzz, both quasi-parodies of the genre) that has such a high body count, a love of guns, and sense of beserk action madness. These days there's too much emphasis on gore or guns are seen as a bit passé. Now you get Jason Bourne attacked people with magazines, or comic book violence of either the toned down Spider-Man kind or the blood-spattered Watchmen kind.  

I should say though, that one of the main plot points I found hard to stomach was the fact that Castor Troy had murdered a small child in the opening moments of the movie - this was a bit hardcore for a film of this type, and then at the movie's conclusion it was so obvious that Troy's orphaned son would be taken in by the Archer family. I felt that this denouément was terrible, it too easily wrapped up the infanticide plot line, and in a manner that was pretty insulting to both the characters of the Archers and the audience.

That gripe aside, I enjoyed the sheer fun on display in Face/Off. And who cares if the premise is laughable - I'm sure I've processed other bizarre elements in less enjoyable movies. And who cares if some of the stunt men's wires were clearly visible in too many scenes. Travolta and Cage were having fun, and so was I. Plus the inimitable CCH Pounder had a small role! Hooray!