director
John Woo
screenwriters
Mike Werb
Michael Colleary
producers
Terence Chang
Christopher Godsick
Barrie M. Osborne
David Permut
cinematographer
Oliver Wood
music
John Powell
editors
Steven Kemper
Christian Wagner
cast
John Travolta (Sean Archer/Castor Troy)
Nicolas Cage (Castor Troy/Sean Archer)
Joan Allen (Dr. Eve Archer)
Alessandro Nivola (Pollux Troy)
Gina Gershon (Sasha Hassler)
Dominique Swain (Jamie Archer)
Nick Cassavetes (Dietrich Hassler)
Harve Presnell (Victor Lazarro)
Colm Feore (Dr. Malcolm Walsh)
John Carroll Lynch (Walton)
CCH Pounder (Dr. Holllis Miller)
Margaret Cho (Wanda)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 138m
u.s.
release: June 27, 1997
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other john
woo films
reviewed on this website:
- broken
arrow
- mission:
impossible 2
|
It
took a director from Hong Kong to deliver the great American
movie of the year so far. Face/Off, the third film made
in this country by the action master John Woo (Hard Target
and Broken
Arrow were the others), is a triumph of graceful chaos.
Bodies spin and hurtle through the air, shooting or getting shot
at -- always in rapturous slow motion that recalls the balletic
carnage of Sam Peckinpah. Yet Woo also finds another kind of
grace: a rich and intense emotional context for the mayhem. The
movie is often preposterous but never meaningless.
Woo's best films (The Killer, Hard Boiled) aren't
just bullet marathons. They're about loyalty, loss, betrayal,
duality. In Face/Off, the two antagonists aiming guns
at each other (a classic Woo image) are aiming at their own faces.
The premise, by scripters Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, is
diabolical: What if you had to wear the face of the man who killed
your son? And what if he, in turn, assumed your face and your
life, while you were driven into isolation and squalor?
The hero, FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta), has lived for
six years in obsessive grief. He can't rest until he catches
the terrorist who killed his little boy -- a freaky nihilist
named Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage), who plans to wipe out L.A.
with a bomb. After Troy has been rendered comatose, Archer has
his own face removed and replaced by Troy's, so he can win the
trust of Troy's cohorts and find out where the bomb is. Later,
the faceless Troy awakens and plucks Archer's face out of cold
storage so he can take over Archer's life.
Face/Off is a masterstroke of casting: we get to watch
two great, physically inventive actors playing each other. When
Travolta is Archer, he's clenched and burned out; the death of
his son has drained all relaxation out of his body. As the happy
psycho Troy, Travolta moves like a man who can be relaxed anywhere,
in any man's body, and he does everything -- loading a gun, taking
off his coat -- with a flourish, as if playing to an audience
in his head. Here, as in Woo's Broken Arrow, Travolta
makes casual brutality seem like a state of grace.
Cage's performance follows the exact opposite track. He starts
off in full crowd-pleasing mode as Troy, dressed as a priest,
squeezing a choir girl's butt as he sings "Hallelujah!"
Yet when Cage becomes the virtuous Archer, he doesn't get duller
-- he gets weirder and scarier. He pulls off a magnificent burst
of rage when Archer first sees Troy's face in the mirror. Cage
also comes up with a truly bizarre bug-eyed grimace that stylizes
Archer's horror at wearing a face he despises.
The core of Face/Off is how each man adapts to his new
family. Troy, in a perverse way, tries to be a good husband and
dad to Archer's wife (Joan Allen) and daughter (Dominique Swain);
Archer, who can't help being decent, baffles Troy's girlfriend
(Gina Gershon) and confronts living proof of Troy's potential
redemption. The dramatic scenes have emotional gravity, while
the exhilarating action sequences defy gravity. In Face/Off,
as in his other classics, John Woo fuses the masks of comedy
and tragedy to give the action genre a new and beautiful face. |
