***SPOILERS***
I had such high hopes for Face/Off it was inevitable I would find the film disappointing. In fairness to it I must admit that I didn't see this film in the cinema and that I didn't see it until after I had seen The Matrix, which I think has set a whole new standard for "artistic" action flicks. After its cool, polished, elegant action and spectacular special effects even a John Woo film was bound to look a little dim in comparison. Woo surrounds his action with glamour, choreographs balletic scenes: but somehow the Wachowski brothers make action itself graceful and glamorous.
The plot of this film is intriguing. Sean Archer
(John Travolta) is an FBI agent hunting evil global terrorist-for-hire Castor
Troy (Nicolas Cage), who in a sniper attack on Archer accidentally killed his
little son Mikey. Rather than dealing with his grief, Archer has plunged himself
into tracking and capturing Troy, thereby alienating his doctor wife
As the plane taxies onto the runway a host of police cars zoom up behind it, and we see Archer driving an armoured vehicle straight towards the plane, head-on. Having killed the pilot and the stewardess, Troy, veering out of the way of the armoured car, steers the plane into a hanger. There is a massive shootout, leaving half the law enforcment people dead, Pollux captured, and Castor in a coma. Archer believes his life's work is over: he goes home and promises his wife he will put in for a desk job and attend bereavement counselling.
Of course, that would make this a very short movie. So the FBI quickly find out that there is a bomb somewhere in the city. Pollux refuses to talk to anyone but his brother, and thus the ingenious concept of this film is brought into play: Archer will undergo medical treatment to have his own face taken off and the face of the comatose Castor sewn on. His voice, his body, everything will be altered: the only indication that he is not Castor Troy will be his blood type.
Along with the ingenious concept, the terrible
flaw of this film comes in at this point: suspension of disbelief. As a rule
I can turn my brain off with the best of them, sit back and accept whatever
rubbish the scriptwriter has cooked up. But that depends on the scriptwriter
being consistent. There are so many inconsistencies in this film that we are
constantly jolted out of the cocoon we need to be in to watch an action film.
I spent half the film muttering "oh, as *if*". For a start, this entire operation
is just *ridiculous*. Then we are told that the chip which alters the voice
is incredibly sensitive, and can even be dislodged by a violent sneeze. Yet
in the next ten minutes Archer is beaten up and fried with a cattle prod, with
no audible effects on the chip. Throughout the rest of the movie he is pounded,
pummelled, shot at and stabbed and this supersensitive chip goes on working
like the Duracell bunny. Then later on, after Castor has somehow woken from
his coma, forced the doctor to sew Archer's face onto him and transform him
into the heavier, stockier man, he seduces
However. The rest of the film consists of Troy and Archer getting into each other's lives and identities: Archer, hanging out with Castor's friends, begins to find himself taken over by Castor's manic personality, and begins to worry he is losing his mind. Castor, who has killed everyone who knew of the transformation, is given the opportunity of his life: as an FBI agent in charge of an anti-terrorism task force, he tells his brother (whom he immediately has released from prison), he will play it straight for a while and wipe out all their competitors. He turns Archer's dour, burdened fed into Mr Personality, getting his borrowed face on the cover of TIME and becoming a national hero by defusing the bomb he himself planted. In a great scene, he sees Archer's teenage daughter getting attacked by her boyfriend, who is parked in front of the house. After dragging the odious youth through his own windscreen and beating him up, he asks Jamie if she carries protection. "You mean, like, condoms and stuff?" she replies hazily. He holds up a huge flick knife with a curved blade, and says "Protection", before telling her how to use it so the wound it makes will never heal. My kind of villain.
Both actors are terrific at portraying the other: in fact, while rerunning scenes from the film in my head while writing this review, I found that I was seeing John Travolta where, in reality, Nicolas Cage was standing: Nicolas Cage was so good at acting Travolta that I was actually seeing Travolta in my mind's eye, and vice versa. It must have been a lot of fun for the actors to do this movie, to pick apart each other's characteristics and mannerisms, and they do a great job. As for the rest of the cast, we see so little of them it hardly matters whether they are good or bad, but in fact all the acting in the film is good, with Joan Allen and Gina Gershon, who plays Castor's girlfriend, particularly good at fleshing out almost non-existent roles.
Although the film sniffs around in the interesting areas of identity and what impact our physical appearance has on that identity, it soon abandons this promising trail to return to the action. Archer has managed to convince his wife of what has been done to him and that the man she is sleeping with is not her husband. He tells her he will make his last attempt to capture Troy at the funeral of his FBI boss, whom Troy eliminated in short order. A massive shoot-out takes place with standard arty action clichés - a church, religious music, a lovely shot with a dove fluttering in slow mo through the chapel - then the arch-enemies transfer to powerboats, where they zoom round for a while and have another fight, eventually blowing up both boats and a tanker before Archer harpoons Castor and eventually gets his face back.
Then comes the creepiest part of the film. Gina Gershon, killed in the shoot-out, asked Archer to look after her little boy, Castor's son. The little boy is very like Mikey to look at, and Archer brings him home to his wife and daughter without seeming even to ask them what they think of the arrangement. Jamie bends down and says hi to the little boy, then leads him into the house. We half-expect her to ask if they can change his name from Adam to Mikey. It's a very weird situation.
Halfway through this film, there is a point where, after a glittering gunfight in a hall of mirrors, Archer and Troy are back to back. Troy proposes they trade bodies again: Archer tells Troy he can never give back what he has taken from him. So Troy says in a languid, world-weary voice "oh well. Plan B: Let's just kill each other." In the movie it's a cool line, but it sums up the lazy attitude of so many Hollywood films nowadays. In our dumbed-down world there's no such thing as an intelligent, considered resolution to a situation. Ca'n't think of a way to end your movie? Go for the Hamlet approach: have a big fight and kill everybody. This film had an interesting, original plot, totally thrown away on an action flick which starts and ends with as many explosions and killings as possible. It's a shame such a good idea was wasted on this movie.
(c) Jennifer Mellerick 1999