An "art" movie in the worst sense

Rating: 3/10 (3 April 2012)

"Face Off" has an irresistible premise, a marvelous cast, a painstaking director with a distinctive, risky style, and nonstop action. Yet I found it abominable.
The ludicrous plot devices have been enumerated by many; they could be excused in a silly, trashy action movie in which a sense of parody is already built in. What happens here is some kind of first; John Woo's care and attention--his "art", some would say--does nothing but point up the inauthenticity of every scene. There isn't a moment that rings true, or that rings false in an entertaining manner. Everyone is familiar by now with the mass-shootout scene in which the hero enters a villain's lair with a single machine gun, dispatches dozens of armed enemies, and emerges unscathed; it's become a new convention. Here, said scene is shot in slo-mo and underscored with a rapturous soprano version of "Over the Rainbow". Woo is saying (pretentiously) that there can be no real beauty in the world anymore; everything is tainted and corrupt. And he lingers so lovingly on the multi-angle shots of evil thugs' bodies being pulverized that we start to feel like Malcolm McDowell in "Clockwork Orange", strapped to a chair with our eyes stapled open. We aren't entertained OR elevated, as Woo hopes; we're just being pushed around.
The movie opens with what in most action films would be a finale; John Travolta's haunted police detective, whose son has been murdered by a sadistic sicko (Nicholas Cage), chases him down at an airport hangar. There are so many flying stunts, crashing stuntmen, and noise that the movie has nowhere to go (without blowing up the audience). Eventually the face-switching premise kicks in, and the movie makes its first REAL mistake--it introduces that force-of-nature actress CCH Pounder (whose voice and temperament are reminiscent of an African-American Colleen Dewhurst), and asks us to believe that she could be overpowered and murdered by Nicholas Cage!!!! She would crumple him into a Brillo pad and use him to do the windows! If the movie had let her survive and serve as Travolta's sidekick, we might have had something to ground us. Instead, we're stuck with a movie full of John Travolta acting like Nicholas Cage and Nicholas Cage acting like John Travolta (just what I always wanted for Christmas) and stuffed with Woo's trademark overdirected destruction orgies, which critics and action fans have dutifully lauded with all the usual adjectives--"dazzling", "hyperkinetic", and, of course, "balletic." (ick is right). A climactic shootout in a church featuring heavily symbolic doves made me rather ill; this should have ended the movie, but we're thrown into yet another (by this time) yawn-inducing chase involving a powerboat. Can anyone guess the outcome? This may be the most exhausting movie ever made; it's all set pieces--it's like watching a musical with nothing but production numbers. Afterward, you just want to lie down and listen to elevator music for several days.