Rent Face/Off (1997)

Two Faces, One Legend - Face/Off review by griggs

Subtlety was never on the call sheet. John Woo’s 1997 magnum opus arrives pre-loaded with everything: slow-motion excess, cascading doves, operatic dual-pistol ballets, and enough explosions to keep a pyrotechnics department in overtime for a decade. It’s maximalism as a philosophical position.

Face/Off takes its own mythology seriously, and the names aren’t accidental: Castor Troy and his brother Pollux are the Dioscuri, twins bound by fate, one mortal, one divine. Woo grafts that duality onto a body-swap thriller trailing some distinguished ghosts. The Face of Another and Seconds both circled the same dark territory: that the face we wear is not the self we carry, and changing one cannot rescue the other. Face/Off arrives with guns blazing where those films crept in silence, but the anxiety is the same.

Two men who’ve never met a moment they couldn’t push further do the rest. Cage and Travolta don’t just chew scenery — they swap it, autograph it, and set fire to the curtains. Cage is all feral jazz hands and holy lunacy; Travolta turns villainy into pure lounge-lizard menace. Rarely has a film been so confidently, deliriously itself.

Not a classic - Face/Off review by AER

I don't think I've ever liked Face/Off. Back in the 90s (iirc) Nicolas Cage was riding high off the back of The Rock, then Con Air, and John Travolta was riding on the back of Pulp Fiction - so I was looking forward to this. I didn't like the overracting and the really bad script. The action sequences still hold up like the speed boat chase and the run way battle, but the acting dates it badly yet I wasn't engrossed at the time either. The film is predictable and lacked flovour. i think this is my least favourite of John Woo's Hoolywood films (in the 90s) - I even prefer Broken Arrow and Windtalkers to this. Hard Target is king. :)

PS look out for an early appearance by Thomas Jane in the prison sequences.