You thought we were done seeing how high we could raise the Cage Rage level here? You thought wrong. 1997 gave us not one, but two contenders for the peak of his career. It’s a film that in its own separate ways is both enjoyable yet baffling, it’s got John Travolta before the scientologists sucked his brains out completely—it’s Face/Off. And yes, only in the nineties could you get away with a title like that.
I’m very curious still to see how the initial meetings for this one went down. I can only assume it went something like this:
Exec 1: “Bro! I just had a great idea! Nicolas Cage, he was in that movie with Sean Connery, right? So he must be on his way to the very top, right? So how about, like, we put him in this film with Travolta, because he’s also gonna on top of the world forever, you dig?”
Exec 2: “So what’s it gonna be about?”
Exec 1: “Well, like, Cage is gonna be the bad guy, who’s angry and crazy for no apparent reason, and Travolta has to stop him from blowing things up also for no apparent reason!”
Exec 2: “But I don’t think Cage will want to play a bad guy.”
Exec 1: “But this is the genius part! Like, for some reason we’ll figure out later, their characters swap faces! So they both play each other! That’s like, two actors for the price of four, or something like that, maaaan!”
Exec 2: “Holy shit, that’s amazing! Man, I’m gonna green light this mother now! Hot damn, is cocaine wonderful! How come they didn’t teach us about it in kindergarten?!!!”
And so that’s how we got here. The director hired was Hong Kong legend John Woo, master of the flying dual-handed pistol barrage, and, well, to be honest I’m not sure if he himself was sure how serious said execs may have been. So, I can only assume he decided to play things both seriously and silly…and the end result is one hell of a ride.
Cage—at first—plays terrorist Castor Troy, who like all terrorists in films pre-2001 just does things because he seemingly gets a massive kick off them, and ends up the nemesis of FBI agent Sean Archer, who also at first is done by Travolta. The film arguably nearly peaks early on, where we get our trademark Cage Moment—Troy dressed as a priest dancing like a jackass in front of a choir, whereupon we get this:
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| It...just barely makes sense in context...I guess? |
Nevertheless, Troy ends up getting captured, but for rather contrived reasons, Archer decides to undergo surgery to put on Troy’s face so that he can…get information out of his brother? I guess it’s another sign of being a product of the pre-2001 era, because audiences since would just ask why ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ liable to start with mallets to the groin wouldn’t be the first option. Though then again even in 1997 people would be asking why the film seems to think Cage and Travolta look that close to each other, but oh well. Regardless, Troy ends up freeing himself, takes Archer’s face in turn, and both have to end up fitting into the other’s place as havoc inevitably ensues.
Well, in fairness, for the peak Cage Moment, we do soon get another contender—where Cage, as Archer post face-op, ends up amid seeming criminal allies, and gets high. Now, given that Cage already acts most of the time like he’s on something with too many syllables in the name, you’d think this’d be hilarious…and you’d be absolutely right.
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| The face you'd just be thrilled to see any PE teacher make. |
I must say, everything else aside, from a technical standpoint, this film’s actually fairly well done, with Woo bringing his honed sensibilities to bear. You’ve got the action sequences of everyone firing a trillion bullets and accomplishing very little besides awesomely annihilating furniture, you’ve got some nicely done editing which never leaves me lost as to the geography involved like other films would, and everything has a nice satisfying kinetic sense behind it…it’s just, well, in the name of some absolute absurdity. And yet, supposedly, in some places around the early 2000s it was supposedly held up by bona fide film professors for its technicality. So, make of that what you will!
Some still are left unable to comprehend Face/Off as anything but a particularly opaque money laundering scheme…and I don’t blame them. It’s completely insane, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. You’ve got Cage being Cage, you’ve got Travolta overacting like his life depended on it (and just a few years later he would dial that up even more in Battlefield Earth, with, ah, interesting career-destroying results), and you’ve got some neatly done sequences that’ll also leave you scratching your head the moment they’re done. For me, I’d personally rewatch Con Air, which keeps things simpler with a wider cast, but this for me stands as that point in Clinton-era Hollywood where you could still get away with stuff like this. And thank god for that.
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