Troy uses the sexual tension, emotional vulnerability, and family discord to insinuate himself into their lives. In one of the film's best moments, a tracking shot of identical tract houses and carefully maintained lawns reveals a uniformity far more restrictive than prison. For Troy, Archer's class and privilege are a nightmare. Woo's critique of conformity becomes even more explicit when Archer must incapacitate and even kill his guards to escape from prison. This isn't so much a film about identity as a film about its corresponding political, material, and sexual rewards.
Violence sustains the lines of demarcatio n between order and terror.
The great fun of the movie is the interplay between the two stars, watching them play of f each other's identifiable characteristics, as the naturalistic Travolta adopts Cage's stylized line readings. Given the film's brutality, its ending is both conventional and sentimental, choking off the subversive critique that precedes it. Send us a message.