Face/Off *** (1997, John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Joan Allen) – Classic Movie Review 598

The incredibly popular but silly, empty and shockingly violent action thriller Face/Off from 1997 continued Hong Kong director John Woo’s mediocre American career. Though, with Woo’s slick, robust handling plus John Travolta and Nicolas Cage’s engaging, swaggering star turns, it delivers lots of extravagant shootouts, explosions and exciting action entertainment for the fans.

Its absurd and outlandish premise, which involves Travolta and Cage literally swapping faces in pioneering plastic surgery, might be endearing in a low-budget Fifties horror film. But here, with the film’s fake pretensions to style and intelligence, it takes a lot of swallowing.

To foil an extortion plot, tough FBI agent Sean Archer (Travolta) undergoes face-transplant surgery and assumes the identity and physical appearance of a ruthless terrorist, the powerful criminal Castor Troy (Cage), who he believes has killed his son and has planted a bomb that will destroy Los Angeles. But the plan backfires when the criminal impersonates the FBI agent by exactly the same method.

Two hours plus (138 minutes) of ultra-expensive (an $80 million budget) explosions and carnage, racking up an enormous body count, with little real imagination expended, this pretty gross movie is just a highly professional job of work and no more. It is largely a waste of all the top talent and big bucks extravagantly scattered on it.

It just goes on and on in an unbroken chain of breathless excess. The slow-mo shoot-up scene of extreme deaths heard through the ears of a little girl who is listening to ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ is a particularly cheap and offensive low spot. Like the mayhem in Tony Scott’s True Romance, the violence here is all glossy and leering. I know it’s meant to be funny, but it isn’t.

Do thrillers have to be plausible and well-plotted with rounded, likeable characters to succeed? No of course not! Face/Off took nearly $115 million in the US, plus another $128 million in the rest of the world, including more than £6 million in the UK.

In September 2019, it was announced that Face/Off is getting a reboot and that Paramount Pictures has hired a writer for a new version.

©Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 598 derekwinnert.com