Movie of the Week: Face/Off

   

 

    Movie of the Week (4/14/13-4/20/13): Going undercover as a police officer usually means you change your name, clothes, and how you act. You usually don't have surgery to make you look completely different or look like somebody else. Well this is what happens in Face/Off when Sean Archer chooses to go undercover as Castor Troy, his archenemy for personal reasons, to uncover plans of a bomb threat in Los Angeles.
    This film stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage as Sean Archer and Castor Troy respectively, well sort of. Both of them do a great job in this because it takes a lot to take on a role this complicated since they switch characters a little while into the movie. They both play two different characters essentially and it turns out to be an entertaining movie. There is also Joan Allen who plays Eve Archer, Sean's wife, who eventually gets stuck in the middle of it and is used in a very good way in the film. The rest of the cast is virtually unknown, but they all still give us very good performances.
    When we see a movie like this we don't go into it looking for Oscar winning performances, I mean it is a movie directed by John Woo. John Woo is a director with a certain style and that style is to blow everything up on screen with some awesome slow motion shootouts and fight scenes. All of those aspects are good if they are used just right, not to make a movie that will win you Oscars, but a movie that will entertain the audience just enough that they don't get too much. This is what John Woo did with Face/Off.
    The amount of explosions and well choreographed fight scenes are mixed in very well with some drama, which centers around the lives of the two main characters. However, when there are the trade marked John Woo fight, chase, and explosion scenes, they are very exciting to watch. From the opening credits to the end credits our attention is drawn to the screen because of the edge of your seat scenes and there are many of them. From the beginning to the climax, which has to be one of the longest on film, we are given a shootout in an airport hanger, a riot in a prison, a shootout in a penthouse, a shootout in a church, a very intense boat chase, and the final confrontation fight. That might sound like a lot, but it is evenly spaced out with the film's 138 minute running time.
    As I said this is a movie driven by John Woo's action scenes and Travolta and Cage. But, there is plenty of good story and drama to go around here too. We are given plenty of back story on both the main characters and their pasts, done through other characters or by Cage and Travolta themselves and in very moving ways honestly. When you do an action movie in general it is hard to get it done right because if there is over the top action it can make the movie dull, this has plenty of intense action scenes, but nothing that would seem over top, although some could probably argue that. Nevertheless John Woo gave us one of the most fun action movies of the 1990's with Face/Off and he did it correctly with the right amount of drama and action. 3.5/4 Stars.