Face/Off (1997) – Film Review

Hollywood finally let John Woo make a John Woo Film. This is both a good and a bad thing. The force of his talent is truly amazing to watch when allowed free reign, but the excess does eventually reach absurd levels. Thus, his previous two American films were something of a trade off – not as exciting as his Hong Kong work, but not as silly, either. Although both HARD TARGET and BROKEN ARROW showed signs of the talent that gave us HARD BOILED and THE KILLER, they were relatively restrained and depersonalized efforts that bore less resemblance to his hard-hitting Hong Kong flicks than did the work of some of his imitators (DESPERADO, ASSASSINS). Now, Woo comes out with both barrels blasting: all the stylistic excess is there, and the script even echoes the themes of his earlier work.
The plot revolves around a typical Woo conceit (the identification of the hunter with the hunted) but in this case, it is pushed to fantastic extremes. Travolta begins by playing Sean Casey, an FBI agent obsessed with tracking down terrorist Castor Troy, who is initially played by Cage. In a series of plot contrivances, Troy is left in a coma (after a brilliantly staged action set-piece), and Casey must undergo a radical surgical process to give him Troy’s face, so that he can dupe Troy’s brother Pollux (Alessandro Nivola) into revealing the location of a bomb. Predictably, Troy emerges from his coma, forces the surgical team to give him Casey’s face, and (now played by Travolta) takes his place. The real Casey (now played by Cage) must escape prison and put a stop to his alter ego.

Typical for Woo, the sheer force of the imagery is supposed to carry viewers past plot absurdities (e.g., using blood type rather than fingerprints to reveal the true identities), while at the same time, the director wants the audience to buy into the emotional lives of his obsessed and haunted characters. To a large extent, he achieves this (with fine help from Cage and Travolta in the gimmicky roles), but he is also undone by his unfortunate video game mentality: all the extras and stunt men serve as sacrificial pawns in the chess game between to the two leads (unlike DIRTY HARRY, you know who the winner is in a Woo movie because he kills his opponent, not because he save innocent lives). Ultimately, the film reaches some kind of overload, after which it becomes difficult to feel any real suspense. Thus, Woo falls short of the ambition achieved in Michael Mann’s masterpiece HEAT, which had just as much action but never lost sight of the story’s humanity.
The theme of the doppelganger (or double) is a popular one in the horror genre, dating at least back to Poe’s story “William Wilson,” in which an unconscionable reprobate is plagued by an identical duplicate representing the moral sense he himself has lost. Later post-Freud variations on the theme tended to cast the protagonist in a more favorable light, portraying the double as a personification of the hero’s own repressed, darker side, which must be defeated. The science-fiction genre eventually picked up the theme, often portraying the doubles as refugees or even invaders from a parallel universe (STAR TREK, THE TWILIGHT ZONE).
The fantasy element allowed these stories to exploit fears and questions about the nature of identity: What makes me what I am? And if my exact double usurps my place, what is left of me? However, although fantasy brings these questions into sharper relief, it is not a necessary prerequisite for exploring the theme; in fact, almost any story based on pursuit or detection will, to some extent, identify the hunter and the hunted or the cop and the criminal.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of John Woo. Films like THE KILLER and HARD-BOILED are structured around the male-bonding that occurs between two characters on opposite sides of the law whose confrontation with each other reveals their underlying similarities until they inevitably join forces. Now with FACE/OFF, Woo (working from a script by Mike Werb & Michael Colleary) has taken the theme to the next step: through a series of unlikely but entertaining contrivances, the hero and villain exchange faces and find that the only way to function in their new guises is to take on some of the characteristics of each other.
The result is fascinating to behold, thanks in large part to tour-de-force performances from the two leads, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta. Just on a simple narrative level, the hook is an unbeatable for story possibilities: How will terrorist Castor Troy exploit his position now that he is accepted as FBI agent Sean Casey? And how will Casey, trapped in Troy’s body, escape from prison and reclaim his face and family? This plot is worked out in a series of engaging action sequences that rival some of Woo’s best Hong Kong work. All of the slow-motion and parallel editing techniques are on display, this time abetted by all the production value that Hollywood money can buy.
The only thing missing here is a little restraint. Not that it would be a good idea to tone down the talent of a directed noted for his over-the-top outrageousness, but the film does reach a point of diminishing returns, past which each new action set-piece (like the boat chase near the end) clearly is a set-piece -i.e., something thrown in for its own sake, rather than an integrated component that illustrates the conflict between the two antagonists.
Along the way, some truly great demands are made on audience credibility. The worst by far undermines the basic assumption of the whole plot: Casey (Travolta) has taken the face of Castor Troy (Cage) in order to get information out of Troy’s paranoid brother, Pollux (Alessandro Nivola), who (we are told) is so paranoid that he would never talk to anyone but Castor. In spite of this, when Troy steals Casey’s face, he has no trouble convincing Pollux of his true identity – off-screen. There is a good reason we do not see this scene: if we actually observed Pollux overcoming his distrust of the agent who killed his brother, it would become obvious that the whole face-transplant ruse could have been avoided Casey did not need to look like Castor to fool Pollux; all he had to do was walk up to him and say, “I am really your brother in the body of an FBI agent.”
This little weakness is not enough to undermine a film whose entertainment value is enough to overwhelm almost any critical reservations, but it does illustrate that FACE/OFF is not quite the unmitigated masterpiece that some critics have claimed it to be. More important, the doubling of the two lead characters – although taken to the science-fiction limits in terms of their appearance – is not taken quite so far in terms of their identities. Sure, Troy acts like a family man and an FBI agent, but it is clear that he is never being tempted into giving up his criminal ways and settling down. Likewise, Casey has nowhere to go for assistance except Troy’s old cronies, but it is equally clear that he has no intention of adapting to a life of crime.
Their methods may be similar – each will do unpleasant things in order to achieve their goals – but their goals are so different that they do not mirror each other as much as their switched faces might suggest. Actually, one of the film’s unanswered questions is what Troy’s goals are. Though labeled a terrorist, he seems to have no political agenda; thus, the audience is denied even the grudging identification of objecting to his methods while sympathizing with his aims. Casey, on the other hand, though clearly obsessed with hunting down Troy, never crosses over into the anti-hero category – because, after all, he is trying to stop a man who wants to kill large numbers of people for no apparent reason. The result is a film that never calls into question Hollywood’s typical good guy-bad guy dichotomy as much as BLADE RUNNER. Ultimately, FACE/OFFÕs plot device is put to good use, and it does lend a certain thematic subtext that grounds the action. But it is the action, not the subtext, which is the key attraction here. And that is more than enough to make this a worthwhile effort.
FACE/OFF (Paramount, 1997). Directed by John Woo. Written by Mike Werb & Michael Colleary. Cast: John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Joan Allen, Gina Gershon, CCH Pounder, Margaret Cho.