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In John Woo’s Face/Off, John Travolta stars as Sean Archer, a top FBI agent who’s at a very low point in his life. Six years prior his young son was accidentally shot to death by his arch-nemesis, the criminal mastermind Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage), in an assassination attempt; Sean was the target, but the boy got in the way and took the bullet instead. Sean wears a scar on his chest (the bullet went through his son’s back and caused a flesh wound) along with a heavy load of guilt, depression, and a seething hatred for Troy. He’s become a stubbornly opinionated man at work and an emotionally reclusive husband and father at home; his wife, Eve (Joan Allen), has grown used to it and sadly realizes that their marriage ties are slowly dissolving. Sean is a wreck of a man who’s managed to become a victim of Troy’s in two ways: the bullet inflicted the physical damage while the aftermath is draining away his humanism. (Travolta convinces you that Sean’s need for revenge is physiologically necessary -- he’s locked into it with a frightening dedication that seems to literally seep from his pores.)

Sean gets a lucky break when an informant reveals that Troy is at the airport waiting to take off in a private jet. The FBI swarms the site, and Troy attempts to take off but is cut off and the jet crashes into a hanger: Troy (with his two gold-plated pistols) and his brother Pollex (Alessandro Nivola) abandon the jet and attempt to shoot it out with Sean and his team. This is the first of Woo’s operatic set pieces, and it’s a beauty. People spring for cover in the narrow cul-de-sacs while others dive, jump and spring forth at one another with their guns blazing. Each shot is flawlessly framed yet not overly calculated -- the sequence is chock-full of voluptuous colorful energy that jumpstarts your senses and puts you right there amidst the action to dizzying effect. None of it’s believable for a second, but you’re not likely to care because all of it’s executed with such ungodly aplomb and a proper respect for coherent spatial logistics where, as opposed to a Michael Bay or Tony Scott film, we can tell where one shooter is in relation to another one. Sean escapes uninjured while Pollux is lightly wounded and Troy becomes temporarily brain-dead after being slammed against a metal grate at terminal force by a plane engine. With a two-hour-and-twenty-minute running time, this is, quite clearly, far from the end, and Face/Off takes a most interesting turn in the second act.

In a beautiful plot twist, Sean learns that Troy and his gang have already rigged a bomb and have placed it somewhere in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Pollux, the electronics genius, is the only one who knows the location of the device and is sent to a prison when the Feds fail to make him talk. Sean, alas, is in a bit of a bind: He’s not authorized to make a deal with Pollux, yet if the bomb isn’t found then thousands of people are guaranteed to die. Then, with all options exhausted, a whoppingly bizarre idea is laid upon Sean. It seems a federal laboratory is working on a top-secret experiment that could change the evolution of genetic science: a procedure has been perfected where a face is literally removed from one person and surgically implanted onto a live person, with the other face removed and stored in a liquid preserver and the subject given the ability to vocally mimic. It’s proposed that Sean exchange faces with Troy, who’s being kept alive by machines, and enter the prison and learn the bomb’s location from Pollux. Sean finds it howlingly preposterous, but with the bomb set to go off in six days he agrees to it with plenty of fear and reserve. To make matters worse, his fellow agents and family are to know nothing about it and the prison officials will presume him to be Troy. He undergoes the surgery, and the result is surprisingly flawless.

Sean is physically an entirely different man (played by Cage), and when he first looks at his reflection the resulting emotional turmoil is painful. The concept was disturbing at the onset, but Sean is unprepared for the horror of externally becoming the man he hates most in the world -- a force of true evil. Cage is a multi-faceted performer with incredible reserves of imagination, and his reactions here are psychologically devastating -- the screams he emits might as well be coming from a lion whose cubs have been slaughtered right before its eyes. Sean’s partner and only confident keeps telling him over and over again that he is Sean Archer…Sean Archer…Sean Archer; the scene is a tour-de-force by emphasizing the tragedy as well as the fantastic wonder of this daring experiment. Sean is then taken to prison and dumped into the main population where he meets up with Pollux and starts working on him. While this is happening, Troy unexpectedly wakes up and is surprised at not having a face. His gang makes the doctors implant Sean’s face onto his, and then they blow up the lab with all the necessary equipment to switch faces.

Troy loves his new identity and gets a jubilant kick out of impersonating a man who everyone on the law-abiding side respects. While Sean was less apt to accept verbal accolades (with him, the negative always outweighed the positive) Troy turns him into a glorified, emoting joker; he lavishes on all the good things that Sean ignored -- when people congratulate him he’s quick to show smugness, and when a pretty agent smiles at him he happily pinches her butt. He also becomes a national hero after defusing the bomb, much to the appreciation of the citizens and the President himself. Troy is currently the man of the world and loving every second of it. So is Travolta. He cuts loose and gives his scenes a giddy sense of naughtiness that are purely incorrigible; he clues you into Troy’s insecure masculinity that craves such attention. Travolta’s having a ball, and the joyful kick he gets from it is perfectly controlled and stops short of hammy showboating. (It’s a much more precise villainous turn than his work in Woo’s Broken Arrow where timidity seemed to engulf him -- he never seemed entirely comfortable playing a villain.) Troy even brings his newfound glee into Sean’s home life. He senses Eve’s loneliness and gives her all the loving attention she’s been craving; she surrenders to it and can’t quite believe the one-eighty her husband’s undergone. And he also works wonders with the daughter. She’s been neglected, too, and Troy recognizes her transparent, obvious signs of rebellion, and instead of scoffing he uses it to his advantage by playing along and gladly lighting up a cigarette with her. In just a few hours he’s managed to pierce the family’s tension by simply catering to their obvious needs that Sean was too preoccupied to pick up on. It’s perfectly ironic that the evil Troy should make an easier transition then the good Sean, who’s being beaten in prison; it reinforces the theory that criminals have the makings to be great cops, with Troy proving that tact can create the fine illusion of goodness.

The film’s third act, though, has a more familiar design and plays out on a much more conventional level where coincidence and split-second encounters keep the plot ticking and the originality thinning. Troy goes to see Sean in prison, and the switched identity allows him the kick of seeing his enemy squirm in a sea of misery; he taunts him with threats against his family, causing Sean to plot an escape from this state-of-the-art facility. (The prisoners are fitted with magnetized footwear that lock onto the metal floors at the touch of a button.) Of course, this being Movieland, the odds are quite good that Sean will escape and face Troy in a last dance of death where only one will survive. But even if Sean wins, how will he get back his face and identity?

Face/Off is so entertainingly written and well-executed that it’s amazing the outrageousness of its central premise is the least aspect to criticize. Screenwriters Mike Werb and Michael Colleary have created an inventive structure for a fine action film, but they’ve gone further by embracing the dynamic dramatics and moral complexities incorporated within it; they don’t shuck them off like most writers would and have the intelligence to deal with the emotions that arise and maturely integrate it into the plot. None of the emotional scenes come off as maudlin, and you’re likely to actually give a damn about the characters (a rarity in the action genre, to be sure).

As aforewritten, both Travolta and Cage do exemplary work. For the film to work in dramatic terms, both actors must walk a fine line between impersonating and showboating: acting strictly as a mimic would cut short the fun to be had from enjoying the identity switch, and overacting would get across the fun but lessen the believability of the internal transition. It’s to both actors’ credit that their original identities are so sharply etched that we have the joy of seeing them flawlessly duplicate each other; they bring a fresh supply of the other one’s quirks and tics into their switched identities while managing to lightly lampoon the other’s acting techniques and mannerisms. It’s a miraculous display of controlled, creatively nuanced acting that deserves to be placed in a time capsule.

John Woo is nothing short of a godsend at respecting and combining the tricky plot components into a cohesive whole. The film feels solid with a minimum of flab and is never boring in its two-hour-plus running time. However, Face/Off does have some problems, but they have nothing really to do with Woo’s technique; rather, it’s his and the screenwriters’ judgment. There’s a scene in the first act when Sean arrives at headquarters the morning after Troy has been captured, and the agents raise bottles of champagne to cheer him; but he’s disgusted over their jovial mood and reminds them that six of their fellow agents were killed in the fight -- he tells them to drink a toast to them instead. It’s a bit off-putting to reprimand the agents (as well as the audience) for enjoying the feat of Troy’s capture when that sequence had been executed with a comic-strip savvy. Woo wants us to enjoy the action bravado he’s affording us, so it’s more than a bit hypocritical to lecture about the consequences of violence when said violence hasn’t been presented realistically -- the dead agents warranted not so much as a walk-on before the gunfire commenced, so our feeling of loss of them is nil. The writers are trying to add moral depth for Sean (and that’s just fine), but they’ve tripped themselves up in this scant bit of moralizing by asking us to cower our heads as a penalty for enjoying the action. How are we supposed to have a realistic take on the scene when six trained agents are mowed down with a Grim Reaper’s efficiency with just a couple of Troy’s pistols? There’s nothing wrong with a morality check now and again, but it’s still ass-backwards to lecture about violence with cartoonish blood on your apron. (Sam Peckinpah was accused of something similar in his The Wild Bunch.) This may seem like a minor thing, yet it leaves a disquieting impression for the duration of the film in that you don’t know whether to be thrilled or repulsed at the ensuing violence.

And there are some plot contrivances that are odious. Sean’s wife works as a doctor at a hospital and, upon learning that, relevancy bells start ringing, and you know this is going to have a bearing in the story. So when Troy destroys the secret lab or when Eve needs a blood sample to determine who her real husband is, it slams the point home even deeper. (Why do women’s occupations in action films almost always have a strained function? If Eve were an accountant then Sean would've been in a world of hurt.) When Sean breaks out of jail, commandeers a fellow inmate, and the two start shooting it out with the guards you might start thinking back to the film’s earlier bout of moralizing and wonder how the filmmakers are going to justify an FBI agent shooting at them. Simple: the guards are portrayed as the most brutally animalistic since those on display in Midnight Express, and the only ones Sean shoots at are those shooting at him -- it’s cushy grounds for Sean (and the writers). The screenplay is occasionally marvelous but can also be maddeningly infuriating. More than a few times when the film pulls off an elaborate trick it’s backed up by an insulting dummy switch, and our respect for the film somewhat dissipates. Broken Arrow moved at a fever clip and was oblivious to logic and reason; here, Woo’s slowed down the tempo and managed to change the rhythmic narrative where these aren’t always pointing in the film’s favor -- there’s more time allowing for recall.

Not the classic a lot of people have enthusiastically labeled it as, it's still pretty good entertinamrnt.

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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=353&reviewer=327
originally posted: 10/06/07 00:12:42
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