While it's difficult to describe the concept behind "Face/Off," it is easy enough to describe the movie with a superlative like "The Best Action Film of the Summer."
Despite all the intricacies of its identity-swapping storyline, "Face/Off" really beats this summer's other action movies with its simple but sweeping symphony of bullets and explosions.
Hong Kong director John Woo's third American feature gives him a chance to do what he does best -- choreograph cool men in black suits and sunglasses shooting at each other.
As confusing as the idea of "Face/Off" sounds in print, it works well on the screen to frame Woo's masterwork of action and mayhem.
The plot is a hybrid of the best elements from "The Truth About Cats & Dogs," "Dave" and "The Silence of Lambs."
Castor Troy is a fashionable terrorist who looks like Nicolas Cage, while his nemesis Sean Archer, who looks like John Travolta, is the FBI agent hellbent on arresting Troy for the murder of his son.
At the start of the film, Castor plants a high-tech bomb in Los Angeles with the help of his paranoid-sociopath genius brother Pollux (Alessandro Nivola). But while fleeing the city, Castor Troy loses a fight with Archer and a jet engine, gets thumped into a coma and the nefarious brothers are apprehended. Here's where it gets tricky:
Archer learns of the bomb's existence and is forced to go into prison as Castor Troy to convince Pollux to divulge the bomb's location. With some quick laser surgery, good guy Archer looks and sounds like Nicolas Cage/Castor Troy.
But while he's trying to trick Pollux, the real Castor Troy wakes up from his coma and steals the John Travolta/Sean Archer face from its nifty carrying case.
So for everyone keeping score at home, Travolta's now the bad guy and Cage is the good guy. Only problem is, the good guy's in jail and the bad guy's running the FBI. The bad guy (Travolta) gets his brother sprung from prison, but leaves the good guy (Cage) behind bars.
Then the fun starts. Archer's plain wife (a well-used Joan Allen) and sexy daughter (Dominique Swain) take to the suddenly lively man they think is Archer. Meanwhile, the real Archer escapes prison, rounds up some of Castor's old gang and plots to kill the impostor Archer.
While the whole identity/personality issue is interesting and the stakes keep rising deftly, the film's real purpose is merely to stage ingenious gunfights, which it does brilliantly.
"Face/Off" presents a collection of set pieces with viscerally stunning gunplay that borders on cartoonish at times, but it never strays into the dangerous self-awareness that weakened films like "Con Air" and "The Rock."
Yes, it's filled with violence and bloodletting, but not the sort of mindless killing that pervades all too many action movies. One shoot-out is set to "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," which hints at the otherworldliness of this sort of violence, while Archer eschews celebrating the deaths of villains.
The one thing that keeps "Face/Off" from perfection is a lack of depth in its characters. Sure, Sean Archer is a good guy and Castor Troy is evil, but we never really see their motivations or understand them as well as, say, the protagonists of "In the Line of Fire."
The bond between Castor and his brother has some good possibilities, but is not fleshed out enough. The talented supporting cast also includes Nick Cassavetes and Gina Gershon as two of Castor's old cronies, though their characters remain relatively flat too.
With stronger character development, "Face/Off" could be as gut-wrenching as it is mind-wrenching.
Still, those are minor concerns for a film that works so well on the visual and narrative levels. John Woo is at his best here, with the help of director of photography Oliver Wood, and the screenplay, by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, fully explores all the right angles and possibilities offered by the face-changing concept.
"Face/Off" delivers all the right stuff for a summer action movie, and then some. While its concept may seem confusing on paper, seeing "Face/Off" makes a whole lot of sense.
