Disappointing

Rating: Null/10 (25 May 2000)

I went into this film with somewhat low expectations, but hey, it's John Woo, I would probably go to a sequal to a movie based on a Saturday Night Live sketch if he was the director. It was kind of what I was afraid a neutered PG-13 John Woo movie would be like. Face/Off gave me hope that a good compromise could be reached between mainstream Hollywood action filmmaking, and John Woo's peculiar brand of "heroic bloodshed" cinema. You can occasionally see a little bit of the John Woo we know and love trying to get out, but mainly this is a showcase for Tom Cruise's ego. You get the feeling that the producers were keeping Woo on a short leash. There were sequences in the movie where I thought to myself "I know this is supposed to be an exciting sequence, but I'm just not excited". Good actors like Anthony Hopkins and Ving Rhames are given fairly useless roles where they have nothing to do. Robert Townes' cheesy script makes me think Chinatown being good was due more to Roman Polanski than him. A far cry from Woo's classic HK films like A Better Tomorrow I&II, The Killer, A Bullet in the Head, and Hard-Boiled.