Face Off 3/10

Face Off (R) 1997
Reviewer’s Tilt (7)
Action-140min
Special DVD Features worth a look-None

Teaming action director John Woo with great casting and a new twist on an old story sounds great on paper. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details. Like most of Woo’s films, “Face Off” is designed more for visual, rather than cerebral stimulation. Woo does what he does best, stringing along a sequence of “over the top” action scenes with just the slightest nod to a cohesive storyline. The action scenes are well done, but not the spectacle one would expect from such an accomplished action director. The plot pits FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) against criminal masterminds Castor and Pollux Troy (Nicolas Cage and Alessandro Nivola).

For those of you keeping score at home, Castor and Pollux, were the twin sons of the Roman god Jupiter, and were revered for assisting the Romans in battle. Archer’s search for Troy covers land, sea and air, well . . . almost air. In scenes only marginally shy of comic book hyperbole, Archer and Troy switch faces and take on each other’s lives. The film accepts and embraces the intuitive implausibility of the situation, through the use of wry one-liners and droll glances. The obliviousness of ambient characters to Travolta and Cage flowing in and out of character, however, greatly diminishes the dramatic impact of what is apparently intended as some form of modern soliloquy.

Most importantly, Woo fails to imbibe the films’ complex elements with much needed cohesiveness. Artistic flourishes, like a Judy Garland gunfight and taglines like Castor’s rakish “I could eat a peach for hours” are simply too few in number to overshadow trite fights, cliché dialogue and obvious plot development. Joan Allen, Gina Gershon and Dominique Swain temper the action with some sensitivity, just not enough to compensate for the film’s many flaws.

Format: Color, Widescreen Anamorphic, Closed captioned.
Sound: (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), (Dolby Digital 5.1), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
Extras: None