Woo's Best American Picture so Far

Rating: Null/10 (12 April 2001)

After a rocky start with 'Hard Target', Woo's early American film career continued in an upward trajectory with the underrated 'Broken Arrow', before culminating in this film, a highly characteristic deconstruction of the American thriller. (One might argue that then a disconcerting falling-off began with 'Mission Impossible 2', but that's another matter.) Once again Woo uses Travolta to good effect, establishing him as a preferred actor only this time in a plot that is, to say the least, bizarre. 'Face/Off' - at least to those who carp about such things - is unrealistic, unconvincing and, frequently, just down right silly. In this film it seems, the 'willing suspension of disbelief' has to be suspended so high, and so frequently, that it is almost out of sight.
But criticisms circling around the questionable realism of the film are missing the point. Woo comes from a film-making tradition where 'common sense' and 'logic' (particularly in action/fantasy pictures) are not considered by viewers as important as they are to audiences here. Stunts and plot lines regularly defy what would be our natural expectations and logic, grounded as we are in the different Western, realist tradition. In his film Woo uses the distancing, and peculiar advantage, that this cultural difference brings, creating an ironic comment on the action film, as well as indulging his own thematic obsessions.
The 'face/off' procedure is simply a plot device, a MacGuffin (to borrow Hitchcock's term for a red herring) allowing Woo's exploration of these concerns. In this light, it's not important that the operation is plainly absurd, or that Cage and Travolta are obviously different body shapes. What matters is the play that this change thereafter allows the director on identity, moral values, audience expectation, acting styles - and all the rest.
As if the underline this, Woo has the actors make a unique, artificial 'face off' movement (down the face with their hands) when the magic words are spoken on screen, a visible mantra to the whole procedure. The implausibility is thereby *emphasised*, not hidden, a dramatic device made into a flourish, not a liability. Woo in short doesn't care about plausibility, because his true concerns lay elsewhere.
But the sniffing at Woo's substantial achievement continues. Yet no one criticises Franju's 'Les Yeux Sans Visage' - which is equally ridiculous in its central conceit - even though there we are supposed to take the operation seriously. Perhaps because this type of event is 'allowed' without raised eyebrows, in our regular horror tradition we wave it through. In Frankenheimer's 'Seconds', to take another example, Rock Hudson is miraculously (and to my mind absurdly) created out of a body of a shorter, middle aged man. 'Seconds' is a (good) film without a post-modern idea in its head - yet has won plaudits because of the wider social issues it addresses away from the unconvincing new identity-creation.
'Face/Off', in short, requires a more sophisticated response from some critics and action fans than it has so far received. A comparison with some of the less complex and more mindless action pictures that appeared at the same time (the overrated 'The Rock' for instance) reveals considerable strengths and virtues. Whereas other action films come and go, 'Face/Off' remains obstinately in the mind, teasing the genre, inviting repeated viewings.