John Woo makes a ridiculous identity swap convincing through the pleasure John Travolta and Nicolas Cage take in playing each other. The gunfire goes on too long, but the acting makes Face/Off worth every implausible assumption it asks us to accept.
Face/Off is an excellent action film with one substantial fault: it keeps shooting after we have had enough. John Woo takes a premise that sounds like an excuse for two stars to show off and gives them good reason to do so. Sean Archer, played by John Travolta, must become Castor Troy, played by Nicolas Cage, to trap him. The pleasure lies in watching both actors treat this absurd proposition as something worth taking seriously, without pretending it is remotely sensible.
Mike Werb and Michael Colleary’s screenplay makes identity an acting problem we can watch being worked out: how much of a person survives a change of face? Travolta and Cage answer through their borrowed mannerisms, each making the other’s presence clear without reducing the performance to an impersonation. We laughed at the nerve of it. The mimicry is funny because we recognise both men in the same performance, and affecting because the person underneath still needs to be believed.
Cage is particularly good at letting emotional unease interrupt the flamboyance, while Travolta makes the opportunity to misbehave look thoroughly welcome. There is generosity in the way they share the joke; neither performance would make much sense without the other. The domestic strain also matters, giving their game consequences beyond the question of who can fool whom. Joan Allen’s Eve Archer gives the domestic scenes a seriousness that helps prevent the leads’ double act from becoming merely a display.
Oliver Wood’s cinematography makes Woo’s elaborate choreography readable, and the action has the pleasure of movement carefully arranged for the camera. The shoot-outs are extravagant, but the staging is controlled enough that the actors are not lost inside them. Editors Steven Kemper and Christian Wagner sustain that excitement within individual sequences; the trouble is how many sequences the film wants. At 139 minutes, it gives us time to stop marvelling at the action and start waiting for the men to speak again.
John Powell’s score helps us take the emotional scenes seriously, though the music can hardly make every change of mood feel natural. Woo expects domestic unhappiness to hold our attention alongside extravagant violence, and sometimes pushes too hard to make it happen. Neil Spisak’s production design treats the science-fiction element seriously enough to support the actors without competing with their extravagance. That steadiness is useful when the performances demand so much of our attention.
The flaw is Woo’s appetite for another shoot-out when the last one has already done the job. Werb and Colleary have supplied a situation with room for embarrassment, intimacy and confusion, and repeated gun battles leave less time for those things to develop. The sentiment can also arrive too heavily signalled, particularly beside such exuberant violence. We accept the impossible premise readily enough; it is the insistence on exhausting its action possibilities that occasionally makes the film feel laboured.
Within the action genre, the unusual thing is how much depends on performance after the central gimmick has been explained. Woo understands that we will keep looking at a familiar actor who has become difficult to recognise, even when we know precisely how the trick works. That confidence carries the film through its excesses. Choose it for the two leads, allow for some surplus gunfire, and do not spend the evening trying to improve the science.
