Margaux and I discuss the hall-of-fame insanity of Face/Off.
Trevor: So, the last time I saw Face/Off was probably a decade ago, and I was really looking forward to rewatching it. I gotta admit, I was disappointed. It doesn’t hold up well, and for that I blame director John Woo, whose style has aged very poorly. He flirts with the visual representations of themes without ever really exploring them, and his style might have been cool in the early to mid-1990s, but it comes off as pretty cheesy. But we’re not here to talk about John Woo (thankfully), we’re here to talk about Nicolas Cage. And even then, this is a hard movie to judge. He’s a lot of fun as Castor Troy, but not so much as Sean Archer, but that’s because Archer is a much more dour character. But John Travolta is great (I say that unironically) playing Troy, which is to say he’s great at playing Cage playing Troy…it’s complicated. But at times, a lot of fun.
Margaux: Not to borrow from How Did This Get Made? too much, but my hilarious man-crush Jason Mantzoukas is totally right about Face/Off, this movie is great because it STARTS with the murder of a child. And only gets better, and by better, I mean even fucking crazier. I am 100% biased, I love this movie. I saw in theaters with my Dad and I remember we just laughed our asses off the entire time. Before our Cage-Mas feature, I probably re-watched Face/Off twice in the last year (not including this time) and enjoyed the hell out of it every time. I don’t have any strong feelings about John Woo other than his daughter is the reason Margaret Cho got cast. But that’s more fact-based than feeling-based. Did I mention that infanticide happens within the first 4 minutes, and that’s not even the worst thing that happens over two hours?
Trevor: I will give Face/Off credit for hitting the ground running. The cold open is child murder, replete with already crazy touches like a mustachioed Cage taking contemplative sips of soda. And the chase on the runway is how most movies end, which is impressive. There’s a lot about this movie I like, don’t get me wrong, and most of it is Cage-related. For some reason the hardest I laughed was when he pointed the gun at the pilot’s head, barking “Fly, bitch!” Any restraint he tried to show in Con Air is out the window here. That said, it weirdly takes a while to get going, because the faces don’t get swapped until the forty-minute mark. And I get that that’s a hard narrative pill to swallow, but if a movie is built around swapping faces, I wanna see some goddamn faces get goddamn swapped, PRONTO.
Margaux: Nic Cage is in full Cage form; from his stain shirt, double guns, odd character trait of loving Chiclets (NO ONE LIKES THAT GUM). A lot of the staging in the fire fight is confusing as fuck, but the body count in this movie is off the charts. It wasn’t till the end that I started counting casualties, and even then, it was alarmingly high. Lord knows about all the others I’d missed.
Trevor: Speaking of faces, Cage makes a lot of crazy ones. Especially in the beginning when he’s disguises as a priest, which – checks notes – he has no reason to be disguised as.
Margaux: “Peach, I could eat a peach for hours.” I remember that line from watching this movie in my childhood, and it still chills me to my core. And the fact that they use THAT LINE, OF ALL THE OTHER LINES THEY COULD’VE CHOSEN, for Travolta to learn to sound like Castor Troy is absolutely bananas. It almost felt like an inside joke with the audience or something. But to answer your question, no, there was zero reason for Cage’s Troy to be dressed as a priest and sexually harass underage choir girls. I’ll bet that was Cage’s “idea” to add “humor” and “characterization” and Woo was all like “yeah, sure, whatever. I literally have no idea what’s going on, but I’ll eventually blow it all up.”
Trevor: Woo is decent at blowing stuff up, and there are some set pieces here I really like. The futuristic prison, for instance, is a possible setting for an entirely different movie. And I appreciated the use of character actors like John Carroll Lynch and Chris Bauer and Thomas Jane. There are a lot of subplots here, which explains its (arguably unearned) 2.5 hour running time.
But again, I’m getting off track, because in case you couldn’t tell, I have some serious problems with John Woo. Let’s get back to talking about Cage, by which I mean Travolta playing Cage, at which, no bullshit, he excelled. Travolta is a far more idiosyncratic actor than people consider him to be, and I think he’s great in oddball roles like this or Hairspray. He was genuinely terrific as Castor Troy.
Margaux: This is the part that tends to get a little confusing. Not because the science isn’t science at all; you don’t just…cut the rim of someone’s face off and presto-chango, they’re you! That’s putting on a mask, not really facial reconstruction. The body swap was and still is the most perplexing part. Just because you have someone’s face on over your face, doesn’t mean you suddenly have that body. By that logic, what’s keeping me from 3D printing Gisele Bundchen’s face and calling it a fucking day? That being said, I do think Cage as Archer (which sounded too close to Sterling Archer of Archer) was really good. When Cage as Archer first declares to himself, “I’m Castor Troy,” half triumphantly and half literally crying, it was that sort of unhinged restraint that Cage pulls off well. Travolta has lots of fun as Troy, but there’s something about Travolta’s face that makes his performance less stupid fun and more serious that I couldn’t quite get into. It isn’t until the final…face…off…where Travolta really gets into it and licks the teenage daughter’s face that I thought he fully embodied the Troy “essence.” Future prison was cool, but I agree that it felt like it belonged in another movie and the break out wasn’t even that interesting. It was an odd aside.
When is good time to talk about Archer family tradition of “face waterfall”? That is some bizarre Helen Keller shit, and the fact that no one shines a light on it or explains how it came to be makes it seem like some actor secret Travolta started and that Joan Allen just had to get onboard with.
Trevor: I think the screenwriting team had to come up with something for Archer to signify who he is, but they picked the most off-putting gesture he could perform. It would almost have been less weird if he poked people in the eye.
Since we’re on the subject of the Archers, I will say that one of my favorite scenes was when Troy (as Archer) beats up the daughter’s boyfriend, whose plan, I guess, was to rape her in the driveway? That escalated quickly. But the beatdown was nicely cathartic, not to mention free of Woo’s usual bells and whistles (so, now slow motion, opera, or doves). And it made for a nice bonding moment.
Margaux: I wrote in my notes that the best thing Troy as Travolta does is beat the shit outta Danny Masterson. Fuck that guy, movie Masterson and real life Masterson. Don’t care for either.
Even though they make a deal at the beginning about the face swap mission being “black bag,” they seems to drop that notion real quick. After Troy (still as Cage) wakes up from his coma to discover his Mason Verger-y face, he calls in the doctor and everyone involved to “fix it” and then thanks them by burning them alive. You’d think a lot of this movie would be Travolta as Troy trying to prove he’s the real Archer, but there’s shockingly very little of that trope here. All Archer seems to care about his dead son. New flash: HE DEAD. Get over it, geez.
Trevor: I thought it was a smart move to skip all that “But I’m really Sean Archer!” business. It’s always the most boring part of movies like these, and I use the plural because The Hot Chick is basically a remake of Face/Off.
On the whole, I liked Face/Off more than I disliked it, but that was mainly due to the performances from Cage and Travolta. You can tell they were actually working hard to capture the others’ essence; they spent a lot of time together before the shoot, and you can tell. But ultimately I hate John Woo too much to really get behind the movie, which pains me to say.
Margaux: But! There’s a 17-person stand off in a church, a metric ass ton of white doves, and a fucking boat chase! Did you know boats and cargo ships were that flammable? NEITHER DID I.
Also, Joan Allen is just…okay with basically having a twin bang pulled on her (you know, when twins switch places and bang each other wives? Yeah, that’s kind of what happened here)
Trevor: Yeah, the doves that Woo uses in every movie because he loves the idea of juxtaposing violence with an image of peace, and that boat chase was just something he wanted to put in Hard Target but couldn’t. This guy has three tricks up his sleeve. Even the “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is cribbed from Hard Boiled.
Margaux: And yet, somehow, this movie has a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes.
I do really love the ending, if we can just quickly talk about how out and out insane it is that Archer adopts Troy’s son (who looks like Archer’s murdered kid he won’t shut up about) and when he brings him home to his wife and daughter, he says his name is Adam, but you know within hours they were calling that kid Michael and dressing him in his dead son’s clothes.
Trevor: It was super awkward and shitty of him to do that! He really put his wife on the spot. “Hey honey, great to be home, and as a gift I brought us another mouth to feed. I’m going to ask you in front of him, so you feel terrible saying no. And kid, you will never, ever live up to the memory of our son.” Truly a happy ending for all.
Margaux: I mean, any movie that has Cage saying, “little boys wee wee room”, with all of the seriousness of Oscar contending movie is instant classic territory for me. Factor in, on top of that, that Face/Off is just the right amount of crazy to make you genuinely wonder, is Cage a great actor? Jury is still out.
Next up: The Trust
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