The Travolta/Cage Project #50 Face/Off (1997)

If I were a wiser or more cautious man, I would have made a point of re-watching 1997’s Face/Off before committing myself to pursuing a four or five year long podcast and online column based on Face/Off and its stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.

Instead I plunged ahead with Travolta/Cage and The Travolta/Cage Project without re-watching Face/Off to make sure that my response to it now is not, “Jeez, I really don’t care for this movie or its stars.. I’ve made a terrible mistake!” 

Throughout this wonderful journey I’ve wondered if Face/Off would be a crashing disappointment instead of the glorious climax it was designed to be. I had a similar fear with UHF. I hadn’t re-watched UHF in a good half-decade before I agreed to write a six thousand word essay about it for The Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of the Weird Accordion to Al book.

What if UHF didn’t live up to my glorious childhood memories? What if it left me cold? I couldn’t very well write a 500 page valentine to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s life’s work in myriad mediums and then argue, at the very end, that UHF was thoroughly okay. 

Thankfully, if unsurprisingly, after writing about every song on every album “Weird Al” Yankovic has put out for this website and the The Weird Accordion to Al books I fucking loved UHF and after watching every movie John Travolta and Nicolas Cage made leading up to Face/Off, the movie more than lived up to my sky-high expectations. 

Ain’t I a stinker?

Face/Off represents a high water mark for nearly all of its principals. It was the epic blockbuster that John Woo was building up to with Hard Target and Broken Arrow and Nicolas Cate with The Rock and Con Air. As much as I adore those movies, in many ways they all feel like mere prelude to Face/Off, a film so spectacular, so ambitious and so gloriously insane that it ensured that everything that followed would have to be a disappointment. 

That was true of Woo’s career in the United States. His American career climaxed explosively with Face/Off, then petered out with Mission Impossible II, Windtalkers and Paycheck before the Hong Kong auteur gave up on our country altogether and returned home. It’s also true of Cage and Travolta, for whom Face/Off was the pinnacle, the apex, the gold standard, the best action movie either man would ever make. 

Face/Off remains special for reasons beyond the central role it plays in my career as a podcaster and writer. There would be no Travolta/Cage or Travolta/Cage Project without Face/Off. If John Travolta and Nicolas Cage had not made this movie together the idea of watching all of their movies and podcasting about all of their movies and writing about all of their movies as strangely simpatico icons whose careers peaked with the same glorious action masterpiece would never have occurred to me and Clint and I would never have embarked on this glorious journey. 

With Face/Off, John Woo got everything right. Everything came together. For one magical movie Woo’s sensibility fit big-budget American action filmmaking perfectly. Face/Off is the purest possible reflection of his genius in an American movie, a melodrama defined as much by its operatic emotions as its epic set-pieces and massive explosions. 

In one of his greatest roles and performances, Nicolas Cage lights up the screen as Castor Troy, a deranged, mustachioed hitman and international criminal mastermind introduced accidentally killing the son of intended target Sean Archer (John Travolta) instead of his father on a Merry Go Round.

There is no pain like the pain of losing a child. It’s a wound that never heals, a trauma you never get over, the worst thing that can happen to any parent. Sean’s bottomless grief at losing his son is at the core of Face/Off, a movie that miraculously manages to generate a tremendous amount of genuine emotion out of the most ridiculous possible premise. 

Woo and his perfectly cast actors walk a tricky tonal tightrope here. Face/Off acknowledges the  comic book absurdity of its central conceit while at the same time playing it completely straight. Face/Off never winks at the audience. Instead it is so pathologically invested in its story, its characters and its heightened emotions that we have no choice but to believe in them as well, no matter how absurd they might be. 

We then skip ahead six years. Travolta’s obsessed hero has spent seemingly every waking moment to trying to capture the monster who killed his son, to the detriment of his happiness, sanity and marriage to elegant doctor Eve (Joan Allen). 

Castor, meanwhile, has spent the ensuing years luxuriating in evil. Also, he shaved off his mustache. There’s not much I would change about Face/Off but it does seem like a goddamn shame that we were robbed a movie where Nicolas Cage got to play Castor Troy the entire runtime, instead of being forced to hand him off to Travolta early in the film. 

In his dazzling early scenes as Castor Troy, Cage radiates palpable, infectious joy in his own extraordinary gifts. Playing Castor Troy liberates Cage. It empowers him. It touches something deep inside his soul. 

In Castor Troy, theatrical madman, championship peach-eater and evil incarnate, Cage gave Travolta a sacred gift. Travolta was even more empowered and liberated by the role of Castor Troy, face and life-swapping lunatic and arch-villain. It brought out the biggest and the best in him. 

I don’t think it’s at all coincidental that after Broken Arrow and Face/Off, Travolta, a man who wants so badly to be loved that in Staying Alive, the sequel to Saturday Night Live, he transformed one of the most fascinatingly broken, toxic anti-heroes of 1970s cinema into a straight edge good guy who just wants a chance to dance, increasingly found himself playing theatrical, larger than life bad guys. 

That was true even after Battlefield Earth. Travolta discovered for himself that the villain gets all the best lines. Travolta is great here but his performance doesn’t really kick into high gear until he’s playing Castor Troy with Sean Archer's face. If nothing else, Face/Off confirms that it’s way more fun to be Cage than to be Travolta. 

I’ve written before about how the key difference better Cage and Travolta is that there is a purity to Cage that comes from his ability to be himself onscreen 100 percent even when playing a psychotic career criminal like Castor Troy. Travolta, in sharp contrast, is seemingly never able to be his true self onscreen. There are always layers of artifice and role-playing and pretending. 

Face/Off turns this into a secret strength by casting Travolta in a role that’s pretty much all artifice, role-playing and pretending. That’s because Face/Off’s Nobel Prize-worthy screenplay casts Travolta as Sean Archer AND Castor Troy. Nicolas Cage also gets to play both Sean Archer and Castor Troy but Travolta gets the better of the deal because he gets to play Castor Troy for eighty percent of the movie while Cage is stuck playing Sean Archer with Castor Troy’s face for most of the film, which is not a bad role but nowhere near as epic or fun as Castor Troy. 

I want his face off!

That’s because Castor Troy is eventually captured by the good guys in one of the film’s many exhilarating set-pieces, albeit in a manner that leaves him seemingly on the verge of death. Unfortunately the feds don’t know where the bomb Castor is threatening Los Angeles with is located and the only person who knows, Castor Troy’s eccentric brother and accomplice Pollux (Alessandro Nivola) is so paranoid that the only person that he will give that information to is Castor, who wouldn’t play ball even if he were not in a coma. 

Thankfully, a simple solution exists in the form of a radical new medical procedure that will allow the obsessed lawman to have his face temporarily replaced with that of Castor Troy’s for the purpose of infiltrating the top-secret prison where Pollux is being held and discovering the location of the bomb. 

Sean Archer will do ANYTHING to keep Los Angeles safe. So even though the father and husband is told that after he has the face of the man who murdered his son transplanted onto his skull he won’t be able to tell anyone, including his wife, he still decides to go ahead with the plan. 

The government similarly will disavow knowledge of Archer’s mission and true identity but nothing can deter our hero from his mission, so he reluctantly signs on to having his face replaced with THE FACE OF THE MAN HE HATES MOST IN THE WORLD so that he can save thousands of lives. 

Now there are some sad, joyless souls who think that Face/Off is somehow a bad or stupid movie just because it has possibly the silliest premise in the history of film. These people are fools and wrong. Face/Off may indeed have the silliest plot in film history, one so far-fetched that it makes The Rock and Con Air look like Frederic Wiseman documentaries by comparison but Woo, Travolta, Allen and Cage commit so completely to this sublime silliness that they manage to make us believe in the unbelievable. 

Superman: The Movie’s tagline famously promised, “You’ll believe a man can fly.” On a similar note, Face/Off will make you believe that a man can swap faces with another man. That Face/Off is not an unintentional laugh riot from start to finish, a guffaw-inducing camp romp on par with Battlefield Earth, is a testament to Woo’s genius and the brilliance of his lead actors and a ridiculously stacked supporting cast. 

Sean isn't the only one get a furtive face-swap. Castor wakes up from his coma without a face but manages to terrorize doctors into slapping Sean Archer’s face onto his skull so that he can take over his identity and his life. 

Face/Off skips elliptically from Castor waking up faceless to visiting Castor in prison to antagonize him with his newfound power and poor Sean’s newfound powerlessness. On one hand I appreciate the efficiency and directness of simply establishing that Castor Troy now has Sean Archer’s face, and job, and life without illustrating all the steps through which that happened. On the other, as a Face/Off fan I also want to see all of those scenes. I don’t care if it would send the budget skyrocketing and add another half hour to the film’s 138 minute runtime: I want it all. If this three hour version cost the studio another fifty million dollars, that would be money well spent. 

While Sean endures the torments of the damned in a prison that’s like a lost circle of hell, cursed to be forever reminded of the worst moment of his life every time he passes a mirror, Castor takes his arch-nemesis’ life out for a joyride and finds that it’s very much to his liking. He likes Sean’s beautiful, classy, accomplished doctor wife and nubile teenaged daughter Jamie (Dominique Swain, very much still in Lolita mode). Heck, he even seems to love his job. 

In one of the film’s many inspired running gags, Castor somehow seems to make for a better crimefighter than the man whose face he’s borrowing for an indeterminate amount of time. He’s such a force for good that he’s on the cover of Time magazine. 

Travolta plays Castor Troy as the proverbial wolf in the henhouse. He's having the time of his life living someone else’s life. Face/Off is the John Woo Freaky Friday reboot we never knew we needed. It’s a body switch comedy of a different sort in that faces rather than bodies are being swapped but otherwise the comedy comes from watching two very different men live each other’s lives in a world gone mad where the seemingly immutable laws of the universe have changed.

Face/Off is a bold, brazen pop art cartoon about some of the heaviest subject matter imaginable: identity, death, grief, guilt and the mourning process. Everything that Woo is famous for he does in Face/Off. He trots out every last one of his stylistic tricks and trademarks and they all work spectacularly well. In another context that might be a recipe for dreary self-parody. Instead this is John Woo to the Nth degree. This is John Travolta to the Nth degree. This is Nicolas Cage to the Nth degree. 

What’s better than that? 

When you hit the giddy heights of Face/Off there’s nowhere to go but down but it’s better to have achieved true greatness and let it slip away than to never have known it at all.  

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