Face/Off (1997)

I didn’t know what I was in for when I convinced a friend to watch Face/Off with me in continuation of my year of Nicolas Cage: I knew there was some body swapping action with him and John Travolta, and that at some point someone was going to say “I want to take his face…off.” My lovely friend Mia, guru on all things Cage related, assured me that this was one I would want to see and she was right: it was wild.

It was released in the same year as Con Air and the two would make an excellent double feature - they are really interesting to consider side by side. Where Con Air often takes itself bizarrely seriously, Face/Off is seriously aware of its bizarreness. In his first real scene, Cage - dressed as a priest, of course - stops in a crowd to headbang, and then gropes a choir girl. John Woo gets it.

This piece of cinematic mastery follows a cop, Sean Archer (initially, that’s John Travolta’s character) whose son was killed by terrorist-for-hire Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) in a convoluted plot involving transplanting each other’s faces onto the other person’s face, and then no one else knowing this has happened. John Travolta’s unhinged Nicolas Cage impression is spot on, and Cage is at his Cageiest (well - bar Vampire’s Kiss). It’s bizarre to watch, but of course, inherently watchable. Also watchable? The senseless violence around every corner, John Woo’s weird love affair with doves, the hilarious almost-gore in the facial removal scene, all of the yelling, and the bit where a teenage girl draws eyelashes onto her face, which is honestly a whole lot of look and could really be something with the right amount of confidence.

We can't just give a pass to everything on the basis of a movie being absolutely hilarious, sadly. There are dynamics in Face/Off that are uncomfortable in a way that goes beyond intention and bordered on unwatchable for me. Watching Travolta as Castor Troy in Archer’s body make sexual passes at Archer’s young daughter was really upsetting, especially when it appeared to be later played off as nothing. It is at least a character moment, though, where other elements of the plot aren’t - characters do things that don’t fit in at all with their earlier characterisations, or respond to stimulus in ways that feel completely out of the blue. It also desperately needed a good editor at the helm - while I loved the out-of-nowhere whips to slow motion and the drawn out scenes that served minimal purpose, the last act of the movie particularly needed some serious cutting down. It got drawn out and there was plenty of excess that could have been trimmed between boat scenes and shots fired and dramatic utterances.

Rating: 7/10 - It desperately needs to be cut down by at LEAST 20 minutes, not to mention being impossible to take seriously and occasionally creepier than it meant to be, but Cage and Travolta's performances elevate this to a level of brilliance. This movie is celebrating its 20th birthday, and it's the perfect time to revel in the delightful union of good and garbage.