Outrageous actioner, with a lunatic plot that is actually quite refreshing.

Rating: 7/10 (4 May 2006)

By 1997, the action genre was looking a little stale. The biggest problem was that each new action movie that came along was trying to out-bang the one before. There's only so far you can go with spectacular stunts and explosions. There has to come a point when you hit a kind of ceiling and the only direction left is back down. By 1997 action movie makers had hit this ceiling and were merely churning out film after film that had virtually the same plot. The actors and the backgrounds may have varied from movie to movie, but the general essence remained identical - and therein lay the staleness. That's why Face/Off is such an enjoyable action movie. It manages to sock across a new plot - something different to the norm, something not seen before - and the result is a sense of freshness that is rare for the genre.
Special agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) is devastated when his young son Michael is killed by a sniper's bullet meant for him. The sniper was psycho Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage), and Archer subsequently dedicates his life to tracking down and nailing this rotten villain. After many years, Archer finally catches up with his nemesis at an L.A. airfield. The encounter ends with Castor being thrown into a wall by the force of a jet engine, an event which leaves him in a coma. All is not as well as one might expect, as before being rendered comatose Castor planted a time bomb, capable of vaporising everything within a square mile, somewhere in the city. The only person who knows the location of the bomb is Castor's paranoid, imprisoned brother Pollux (Alessandro Nivola), but with his big brother indefinitely unconscious there seems no hope of Pollux giving away his secret. Archer is persuaded to undergo radical surgery that will allow him to look like Castor - to literally "wear" his body and face - so that he can go to jail posing as Troy, and get the truth out of unsuspecting Pollux. But the plan backfires when Archer (now, bizarrely, played by Cage) is undercover in prison.... for the real Castor (now played by Travolta) comes out of his coma and turns the table on his adversary. The good guy is trapped in jail and the only people who know his true identity are killed; meanwhile the bad guy is out on the streets being hailed by everyone as a national hero!
Face/Off is totally absurd, but a lot of fun. The absurdness is almost deliberate, like an outrageous catalyst used to kick-start the ensuing proceedings. Cage and Travolta have a tremendous time aping each other's character once their "faces" have been switched; Nivola is twitchy to a fault as Castor's hyper-anxious brother; and Joan Allen has a super role as Archer's understandably bewildered wife. John Woo orchestrates the action very cleverly, with his usual slow motion flourishes, and some hair-raising sequences. There are occasional talky moments that teeter somewhere between tedium and melodrama, but when the pyrotechnics take over Woo delivers the goods. Face/Off is a very enjoyable actioner, just outlandish enough to be an effective clichÃ©-breaker.