Face/Off
With John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Joan Allen, Gina Gershon, Allessandro Nivola, Dominique Swain, CCH Pounder, Harve Presnell, and Nick Cassavetes.
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Woo’s Hollywood debut, Hard Target, found him hamstrung by meddlesome studio execs and a contractual obligation to deliver an R rating; Woo could neither overcome the profoundly impassive Jean-Claude Van Damme nor unleash the full power of his aesthetic. His follow-up, Broken Arrow, was far more successful: working with a better script and stronger actors, Woo used radically opposed settings, shifting from desert landscape to the compacted space of a mine shaft, and his constant camera movement created a rush of frenzied images. But if Broken Arrow marked a clear advance over Hard Target, it remained a disappointment, marking a breach between Woo’s potential and the product he turned out. Both films lacked Woo’s passion, his deep affinity for his characters. Without the solitary, existential rigor of Chow Yun-fat or the moody sensuality of Tony Leung, Hard Target and Broken Arrow became empty showcases for Woo’s formal dexterity.
Woo’s third Hollywood movie, Face/Off, is the first to balance his visual imagination with the emotional intensity of his Hong Kong films. Dark, brooding, and claustrophobic, it welds Hollywood technology and high production values to Woo’s trademark delirium; by submitting to his sense of the awesome and outrageous, Woo creates more excitement than one is likely to find in the numbing spectacles of Con Air, Speed 2, or Batman & Robin. For the first time in his Hollywood career, Woo is free to fully explore the possibilities of style and action.
Redeemed by Woo’s bravura skills, Face/Off becomes more than just a genre exercise. Indeed, Woo seems to acknowledge the absurdity of the premise: he pushes the material to its perversely logical conclusion. The great fun of the movie is the interplay between the two stars, watching them play off each other’s identifiable characteristics, as the naturalistic Travolta adopts Cage’s stylized line readings. But Woo can’t completely transcend the genre; he can’t disrupt the expectations of the material or find a surprising resolution to the bizarre premise. Given the film’s brutality, its ending is both conventional and sentimental, choking off the subversive critique that precedes it. Still, Face/Off is best appreciated as John Woo’s liberation, a point he underlines near the end by restaging a shoot-out from The Killer. A dizzying, beautiful ride, Face/Off is a welcome jolt to the system.
