John Woo’s maximalist style and taste for melodrama allowed him to ply his wares in Hollywood with far less friction than usually arises when an Asian auteur attempts to adapt their m.o. to meet American filmmaking demands. Despite issues with the more aggressive oversight of Hollywood execs, his Hard Target and Broken Arrow were both box office successes that, especially in the case of the former, retained a remarkable amount of Woo’s signature aesthetic flourishes and artistic philosophy. But the purest and maddest canvas on which he painted one of his American yarns remains Face/Off, a film that magnifies the over-the-top methods of its lead actors as adroitly as his Heroic Bloodshed films reflected the practiced cool of Chow Yun-fat.
Apart from a brief, functional opening flashback that introduces the personal connection between F.B.I. agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) and career criminal Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage), Face/Off immediately dials in on the operatic lunacy of its two leading men. Sean heads off to work by saying goodbye to his family with such exaggerated affection and jumpy body language that he suggests an extraterrestrial attempting to maintain cover among humans. Castor, meanwhile, walks into frame posing as a priest and feeling up choir members while making orgasmic faces as he plants a bomb powerful enough to level a few blocks of downtown Los Angeles. Within minutes, the characters are engaged in a massive shootout as grandly staged as the climaxes of Woo’s earlier Hong Kong films, complete with a downed getaway plane and a Mexican standoff.
This confrontation ends with Castor comatose, and with his hidden dirty bomb ticking away and the F.B.I. attempting to locate and defuse it. To do so, the bureau selects Sean for an experimental program that will swap Sean and Castor’s faces so that the agent can be embedded in prison with the criminal’s brother, Pollux (Nick Cassavetes), and goad him into revealing where they planted the bomb. Even by the standards of Jerry Bruckheimer’s imperial era of the 1990s, this is an absurd plot convolution, but it pays off in a crucial way: It forces Cage and Travolta to start playing their characters the way they think the other actor would.
Watching these two actors work through this process is one of the high-water marks of late-’90s blockbuster cinema. Travolta introduces Sean as a morose, grieving father who approaches his work humorlessly so that he can later undercut attempts to maintain cover by letting some of Cage’s facial tics and neo-greaser attitude creep into his stoic expressions. Cage, meanwhile, dials back his manic energy for glimpses of a man consciously thinking about how to conjure it, like a musician silently mouthing out the beats of a rest before roaring back with a solo. It’s rarely a measure of quality to judge a film by how much fun you can tell the actors had making it, but it’s a consistent pleasure watching Travolta and Cage parody each other and themselves.
Not to be outshined, Woo raises the stakes of his own action filmmaking. The first action sequence alone is a litany of sparks, fuel tank explosions, and gunfire as the camera leaps between isolated shootouts without losing coherence of each one’s spatial relationship to the others. And with Woo working on a bigger budget, his trademark level of grandiosity—his usual visual tics, from slow motion, to melodramatic emotional displays amid so much carnage, to multiple points of focus, abound in each set piece—feels especially supercharged here.
Face/Off even incorporates subtle commentary on the machismo of Hollywood blockbusters. Woo’s preferred prop gun of choice, the sleek and elegant Beretta 92F, makes an appearance in the climax, but otherwise the firearms here have a bulkiness and high-caliber output suggestive of a kind of insecure overcompensation and lack of finesse, most notably Castor’s ostentatiously gold-plated M1911s. More so than either of Woo’s prior Hollywood movies, Fact/Off not only finds him plying his signature style, but twisting American cine-clichés to new purposes.
The film also bears the imprint of Woo’s unabashed sentimentality, though this isn’t always to its benefit; the recurring image of Sean showing affection to his family by running his hand over their faces defies justification. Elsewhere, though, we see Sean get the chance to confront unprocessed grief over his murdered son (Myles Jeffrey) when “Castor” visits his neglected child (David McCurley) and shows him tenderness, later protecting him when cops raid the room and a firefight ensues. Some of the gentlest acting that Cage has ever done can be seen in the cautious, inquisitive way that Sean, still wearing Castor’s face, connects with the criminal’s son.
Even the traumatic chaos that “Sean” unleashes on the Archer clan as he behaves with sexual aggression to the real Sean’s wife (Joan Allen) and daughter (Dominique Swain) is ultimately a vehicle for mending a broken family, as Sean must not only save them from physical harm, but own up to his own psychologically damaging coldness toward his loved ones. Face/Off starts on a ridiculous note and escalates to sublime silliness, but it ends on an unexpectedly touching conclusion of a piece with the reflective endings of Woo’s greatest Hong Kong works.
Image/Sound
Kino Lorber’s new 4K scan of Face/Off’s negative brings out additional details previously unseen on home video releases of John Woo’s film. Textures are generally sharper and colors reveal subtler shades, and gone are the few instances of overly smoothed frames from Paramount 2008 Blu-ray. Black levels are stable and the many muzzle flashes and explosions now pop with extra intensity. The boisterous 5.1 track included on both the UHD and Blu-ray discs doesn’t suffer from channel bleed or dialogue loss, making the lack of an upgraded surround mix no cause for complaint. A lossless 2.0 stereo track is also included.
Extras
Most of the extras here are ported over from Paramount’s Blu-ray. There are three commentary tracks, including one by Woo and writers Mike Werb and Michael Colleary. Taking the lead, Woo tracks the changes made to the script and fondly reminisces about the creative freedom he had on the project compared to his preceding American productions, while the writers add further insight into the process of crafting and reshaping the script. (A second track with just Werb and Colleary is so redundant that it’s a surprise that it was included in the first place.) A newly added commentary comes courtesy of film historians Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, who discuss the film’s place in its director’s and stars’ careers. There’s also a new, brief documentary devoted to Woo’s filmography, as well as a previously issued making-of documentary that digs into the film’s balance of goofy high-concept sci-fi and earnest character drama and its various special effects and stunt coordination. A handful of forgettable deleted scenes round things out.
Overall
John Woo’s most riotous American film receives a solid upgrade to UHD from Kino Lorber.
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