Face/Off (1997)

This is simply the best action movie I have ever seen. Very few movies come close, but don't overtake, this masterpiece. John Woo has unleashed an action movie that all should see at least once. And all action fans should own. The action scenes are fast and furious, the script is great, and the story is pretty good, and John Travolta and Nicholas Cage give excellent performances. See this movie now if you haven't already, or if you just haven't seen it recently you will not be disappointed. This movie would get 10 out of 10 from me.

Fmovies: Plenty of action yes, of the 1000 bullets per second with no-one getting hurt variety, but a laughable plot. Cage's face is removed and grafted onto Travolta; Travolta's original face is then saved for replacing at the end of his mission. Obviously the face would be locked away somewhere safe and out of harm's way? No, when Cage unexpectedly comes around he gets out of bed, looks through the window, and there, in the room right next to him and in a brightly illuminated jar is Travolta's face! At this point I watched the video for a little longer to see if it could get any more ridiculous and when it started to, I turned it off.

One of the worst films I have seen in a long time.

A movie about a hockey match, this isn't.

1997's "Face/Off," the third (and to this date, most successful) American feature from Hong Kong action director John Woo, is everything a fan of Woo's Asian work could possibly hope for. It's a loud, fast-paced, and spectacularly violent epic helmed by a master craftsman. And even with this ambitious third American feature, it is vastly on par with the director's Hong Kong work and is very easily one of the best films of his career.

Woo made a name for himself back in Asia as the director of hyper-stylized, hard-hitting pot-boiler action films like "The Killer" (1989) and "Hard Boiled" (1992), where he made an art form of dual-pistol-wielding gun-play and action shoot-'em-up. You want action? John Woo is your man to go to. He made his first American feature with Jean-Claude Van Damme in "Hard Target" (1993) and followed it up with "Broken Arrow" in 1996. Now we're at "Face/Off."

"Face/Off" stars a daring and intrepid Los Angeles F.B.I. agent named Sean Archer (John Travolta), who for the last six years has been on the trail of psycho freelance terrorist Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) after he killed Archer's young son. So when Archer finally captures Troy (who's put into a coma as a result) within the film's opening 20 minutes, Archer thinks it's the last of his arch-nemesis.

But of course it's not over, not by a long shot. The screenplay by writers Mike Webb and Michael Colleary throws us a curve-ball in the form of something write out of a sci-fi medical novel: to save L.A. from biological annihilation, Archer must become his enemy and learn the location of said biological payload. Archer trades physical identities with Troy bu undergoing a radical surgical procedure to get Troy's sociopath younger brother Pollux (Alessandro Nivola) to give up the goods.

However, Troy comes out of his coma and assumes Archer's identity as an F.B.I. man, a job he comes to love and abuses with joyful glee, and even gets cozy with Archer's neglected wife Eve (Joan Allen) and daughter Jamie (Dominique Swain). His first move is to destroy all the evidence that proves each man's true identity and seemingly leaves no way to reverse the procedures when he kills everyone involved in the mission (how sick and twisted is he, anyway?). His next plan is to systematically eliminate his old allies to afford protection for himself and his brother. In the meantime, Archer (as Castor) is left to rot in a federal prison that the Geneva Convention doesn't know exists and has to find a way to get out to defeat his nemesis once and for all, even if it means actually "becoming" him, and using Troy's old buddies to his advantage. You want to talk about identity crisis?

10 years after its release, this movie is still as balletic and energetic, action-packed and exciting as it was all those years ago. John Travolta and Nicolas Cage were perfectly cast as the perfect hero and perfect villain in what was one of the hottest action movies of that year. The only problem is, though, both actors enjoy switching their roles and playing off each other in a vicious blood feud, although it seems that Travolta was having the most fun here, leaving Cage a little hard-pressed to remain on the sidelines as the hero. Hot off their success in movies such as "Pulp Fiction" (1994) and "Leaving Las Vegas" (1995), Travolta revels in Ca

Face/Off fmovies. "Face/Off" is a somewhat complicated action thriller which involves an obsessed FBI agent (John Travolta) who decides to become a comatose criminal (Nicolas Cage) by literally trading faces with him. The purpose in doing this is to learn where a bomb is by going undercover in a maximum-security prison and getting the information from Cage's brother. When Cage's character comes out of his coma, he decides to take Travolta's face. Still with me? In short Travolta's FBI agent is now Cage's crazed criminal and vise versa. What follows is a wild and crazy thrill ride that is a bit hard to keep straight, but ultimately fun to watch and quite satisfying. Overall a really good film. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

What can I say?! One of the best movies I have ever seen. The Storyline is superb, and the acting is of the finest actors there is. Cage and Travolta deserve Oscars for their performances; how Cage changed from a murdering criminal to a determined good cop in the way he did, I will never know.

Another great element of this film is the action: Guns, knives, grenade launchers, AK-47s and so on! Some of the greatest gun fights I have ever seen in any movie take place here, specifically the the cop vs criminal fight in the mansion, is it? Anyway, these are just a few things I have mentioned that put this in my top 3 movies. But I must emphasise the acting once more, and how tremendous both Travolta and Cage are in this master-piece.

10/10, or in other words, brilliant!

FACE/OFF

Aspect ratio: 2.39:1 (Panavision)

Sound formats: Dolby Digital / DTS

This magnificent thriller represents director John Woo's triumphant return to the kind of hyperkinetic, emotionally charged film-making which made him such a hot property in the first place. Following the artistic bankruptcy of his first two Hollywood projects, this one is a marriage of high-octane movie-making and mind-twisting narrative complexities. It's also one of the few American action movies which manages to strike a balance between crowd-pleasing set-pieces and domestic interludes, and renders them equally important. John Travolta and Nicolas Cage are perfectly matched as hero/villain (and vice versa!), whilst heavyweight theatre actress Joan Allen provides the narrative with much of its dramatic backbone in the role of Travolta's wife (the scene in which she is first confronted with her husband in Cage's body is almost identical to a similar scene in Terence Fisher's FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED [1969]).

Technically, the film is a blast, and Woo stages the action highlights with a visual grace and dexterity that is often breathtaking to behold. The climactic speedboat battle is probably the finest set-piece of Woo's career to date, and the script is overflowing with visual and thematic ironies that underscore the action highlights. In fact, the production has arguably more dramatic resonance than any other Hollywood blockbuster of the 1990s, but the dictates of American commercialism mean that Woo is only able to skate over the emotional surface of his characters and their moral dilemmas. The two main protagonists are much too cold and heartless to fully engage the audience's sympathies, and there's nothing here that matches the scorching human drama of, say, BULLET IN THE HEAD (1990). But for all that, FACE/OFF dares to go deeper than your average Hollywood action picture. It's clever, witty and thrilling, and it manages to accomplish the difficult task of feeding the brain whilst entertaining the eye.