"Face/Off" - Film Review

Inimitable genre director John Woo doesn’t make movies so much as thinly veiled excuses for action. Face/Off is a great example of this. I could fault the film several times over if its action sequences weren’t so damn entertaining. The film, in general, is very entertaining (sometimes unintentionally so) because it’s so frequently loud, excessive and over-the-top.

So much of your ability to enjoy the film will depend on your ability to just role with it. The film seems to accept everything that takes place at face value. This is perhaps most true of the titular “face-off” wherein the two protagonists FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) and terrorist Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage) have a surgical procedure to switch faces and change their identity. It’s absurd certainly, but the film just keeps pushing forward as if this is completely logical. 

The film takes pleasure in its twisted take on the body swapping. Castor sleeps with John’s wife and creepily flirts with his daughter. Meanwhile John as Castor rots away in a prison where everyone, including the corrupt prison guards, is out to get him. The most fun found in this is how the turn of events allows for both Cage and Travolta to be completely, delightfully hammy. But this excessiveness is in line with the film’s sensibilities.

This excessiveness is best seen in the film’s many elaborate action sequences. They’re so operatic and ostentatious that sometimes you wouldn’t be remissed to be laughing at the brashness. Indeed the film’s exaggerated manner can make it feel like it falls into the realm of self-parody; this is perhaps best exemplified by the film’s final action sequence which has such an intricate Mexican standoff occur that it almost becomes a commentary on the lengths action movies will go to entertain us.  

At times, this excess seems to be at odds with how self-serious the film is. There’s a weird sentimentality to the film that feels like it belongs in a different movie. The emotional undercurrents are obviously there to keep the whole affair thinly strung together. But you never really get invested in the family drama on John’s end of this ordeal. Oh sure, you get unnerved about Castor stepping in and taking advantage of John's daughter and wife, but that’s more likely just because you’re a decent human being than because these are fully formed characters worth caring about. 

Throughout Face/Off I kept thinking to myself how for a film with such an uncliched premise, it’s a pretty clichéd film. Much of this is due to how heavily it relies on the body swapping premise, which plays out fairly predictably. In fact, so much of it plays out in a sort of aw shucks hijinks-y manner that you could potentially see this as a dark, masculine, action-filled spiritual successor to Freaky Friday without all the gooiness and messages about mother-daughter relationships. The moment both characters get to be the other person they go right ahead and take advantage of the new body in ways we could all but have guessed the moment the film began leading us down this rabbit hole. That’s not to suggest the body swapping, in all its predictableness, isn’t fun. There’s actually a surprising amount of entertainment to be gained from Travolta essentially playing an unhinged Nicholas Cage and Travolta seems to delight in his ability to play up every possible moment.  So in essence we get two people playing two different Nicholas Cages. As Film Crit Hulk (who you should all read) pointed out, Nicholas Cage can instantly make any film watchable, not necessarily better but at least interesting and potentially entertaining, and that’s definitely the case here. 

The simple truth of the matter is that parts of this film I liked while others parts I really disliked (at times in equal measure), but at the end of the day I really enjoyed it. I’m a sucker for a film that attempts to get a reaction out of me (not in an exploitative way, of course); film’s that use the spectacle of cinema in such a way where you can’t help but get on its wavelength and go along for the weird, goofy ride. 

It's beautiful to behold, exhilarating in its action and hilarious in its characterization. Its imagery, thrills and humor (sometimes unintentional) are enough to gloss over the absurdities inherent to its premise. 

Grade: B-