Highly entertaining but quite silly

Rating: 7/10 (19 August 2019)

John Woo's Face/Off is a classic amongst the many action films made in Hollywood. This movie belongs to the 90s. It's a movie that is very entertaining to watch but has quite a few flaws in terms of its storyline.
Face/Off follows Sean Archer, an FBI agent who goes through a surgery to look like the criminal Castor Troy in order to stop an attack on the city. However, trouble ensues when Castor Troy takes on the look of Sean Archer.
Let me start off with the acting as that is the most credible part of the movie. John Travolta and Nicolas Cage are solid throughout. It's not easy to play two very contrasting personalities but both of them make it look extremely simple. Without Travolta and Cage, this film wouldn't be as entertaining. All the other supporting actors do justice to their roles as well.
John Woo's direction is good but it could definitely be better. Majority of the time, Woo's direction is really good but the area where he falters is the shootout scenes. During the shootout segments you can tell something is going on but you don't what since you don't directly see the action taking place. There is just a lot of quick cutting and shots of guns being fired. In the final action sequence you can tell where a stunt double has been used instead of the actors. There were some errors as well during the action scenes. In one scene where Castor shoots an agent, you can see the wire being used to move the agent backwards. A lot of films have errors like this but they aren't as visible as the ones in Face/Off.
The actual storyline of this film is very creative and unique but parts of it doesn't make sense. Both actors have a very different physique so how do they change their body structure so quickly after the surgery? The surgical procedure itself would take a long time to recover from but the film shows an instant recovery. Like this, there are quite a lot of plot holes within the script.
Face/Off isn't a perfect film. In fact it's nowhere near one. The entire premise has a lot of areas that aren't patched up but what sells this movie is the ridiculous action scenes and impeccible acting from Travolta and Cage.