Not as good as I remember back in the day.

Rating: 6/10 (22 December 2008)

Face/Off starts in Los Angeles where international terrorist & all round bad guy Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) has just planted a huge bomb at an exhibition center that will has the potential to kill thousands, however special ops agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) & his team have been tracking Troy for years & after a lead comes good they discover that Troy is about to take off in a private jet. Archer & his team get there in time & stop Troy from leaving Los Angeles but Troy is badly injured in a shoot-out & ends up in a coma. On a computer disk found on Troy there are plans for the bomb & Archer know's that Troy has planted it somewhere. The only other person who would know where the bomb is happens to be Troy's brother Pollux (Alessandro Nivola) but he obviously won't talk to Archer or the authorities so in an elaborate plan to fool Pollux into revealing the location of the bomb cutting edge medical procedures are used to surgically attach Troy's face onto Archer but the plan goes awry when Troy wakes up from his coma & has Archer's face surgically attached & takes over his life as the real Archer is trapped in prison as everyone thinks he's the real Castor Troy...
Directed by John Woo this was originally released back in 1997 & I saw it around that time when it came out on DVD & since then I hadn't seen it again until last night & I have to confess that I was rather disappointed with Face/Off & it's one of those films that is nowhere near as good as I remember it. I guess when we are younger we are more easily pleased & the two impressive action scenes which bookend the film are most people's overriding memory of Face/Off which conceals the fact that the hour & a half between those two sequences in my opinion is rather dry & boring. The script features the usual Woo trademarks of honour, revenge, trust, loss & flying doves but I must admit I found it all a bit pedestrian. The initial shoot-out at the airport & the switching of faces is neat & pacey but after that the films slows right down as the drama kicks in & in a film with a fairly silly premise serious drama just doesn't quite work. The basic idea of having the hero & villain swap identities to the extent where they assume each other's lives & what effect that has on them is amusing for a short time but it wears thin pretty quickly as you count down the minutes the inevitable showdown between the two. Having said that the film is perfectly entertaining & has a few excellent stand-out action set-pieces that really stay in the memory.
The film has some very impressive action scenes & they are stylishly shot with an actual steadicam you we can actually see what's going on! The violence is moderate consisting of mostly shoot-outs but they are choreographed with flair & panache. The science involved in the face transplant scenes is total nonsense & didn't sit well with me, what about Castor's teeth? Did they take all of Archer's own teeth out & replace them? You really do have to suspend your disbelief & just about everything you know about medical science to believe the procedures on show here & that's a big problem, since you don't believe it the film never quite recovers or works as it is intended. Apparently Face/Off was going to be set in the future but it was changed to the present & I definitely think the story as a whole would have been a lot more plausible set at some point in the near future.
With a supposed budget of about $80,000,000 this actually turned a profit which slightly surprises me, to be honest eighty big ones sounds like a lot of money to me & apart from the opening & closing action scenes I am not quite sure where it all went although Travolta was paid apparently paid a cool $15,000,000 while Cage got a more modest yet still not bad $6,000,000 so that's over twenty million of the budget gone already. The acting is alright, Travolta puts in a good performance while Cage less so.
Face/Off is a film you will remember for several excellent action set-pieces that stay in the memory much longer than the sub standard soap opera drama that passes for much of the middle ninety minutes. Not too bad overall but not as good as I remember from the first time around.