Well, at least they didn't feed their faces to the dogs...

Rating: Null/10 (17 July 2003)

POSSIBLE SPOILERS: DO NOT CONTINUE IF YOU WANT TO WATCH THIS FREE OF ANY DESCRIPTION OF PLOT DETAILS
The highlight of this movie is watching both John Travolta and Nicholas Cage playing their respective characters and then switch roles part of the way through. Travolta plays Sean Archer, a G-man hunting down a nasty terrorist named Castor Troy, played by Nicholas Cage. The beginning of the movie shows Castor Troy attempting to assassinate Archer, who is on a carousel with his young son, only to accidentally kill the little boy in the process. It is a heartbreaking scene and sets up the serious jones that Archer has for getting his hands on the guy quite well. After a watered down but still frenetic John Woo style shootout in a hangar, Archer manages to catch his man when Troy ends up in a coma from a hard hit. Problems ensue when the authorities find out that Castor and his beloved brother Pollux, who was captured during the shootout, have planted a biological thingamajig somewhere in the city that's set to blow at an unspecified time and only Pollux knows where it is and he ain't talking from the prison he's locked up in. Desperate, a couple of higher-ups devise a plan to have Archer and Troy switch places by means of a radical new surgery procedure to get Archer to divulge the specifics of the bomb's location and it's detonation time. Basically, they take one guy's face right off and slap it on the other guy's freshly skinned face, along with several other body shaping methods. This is the point where if you don't suspend your disbelief, you're going to be in for a painful sitting. I agree, the whole concept is ridiculous. I read an interview with a neurosurgeon or someone similar who was asked to give his opinions on the surgical operation in the movie. He said something along the lines of how lasering the face off of someone is likely to cause an incurable amount of trauma, something which was readily apparent to me when I initially saw the movie. The rest of the movie has Cage playing the good guy and it's pretty interesting to see how well he plays it. Travolta gets kudos as well and even manages to produce several laughs by making fun of his own physicality when playing Troy. I enjoyed the movie, though I felt it wasn't true John Woo. As far as the action goes, yeah it's fine. People don't run out of bullets at all. People use two handguns at the same time. People pull guns out of nowhere just when you think they had no more guns to spare. The movie is actually pretty violent but the action is nowhere near as good as Woo's original Hong Kong stuff. I felt that the movie dragged in certain places as well and the runtime is a bit long. The thing that makes the overall film work, as I said before, are the over-the-top performances of both Cage and Travolta. It's great to see them basically mimic each other down to the tee. If anything, the least you will walk away from this movie with is admiration for the two. Say what you will about either one but they managed to prove just how good they are at their craft with this film.
RATING: ***1/2 out of *****.