Movie #5 - Face Off

Yes... it was bound to happen. Being so busy and so lazy at the same time, I have already started to lose touch with my two blogs. However, I am vowing to make a consistent entry each time I watch a film.

In this case... this is a retroactive entry from a couple of weeks ago. I watched about 75% of this movie and since I have seen it before - many times, I figured, it should be added to the review list.

What made this movie reference funny was that Face Off was being shown on the History Channel of all places on a Saturday night. I know that most televisions in Canada are usually watching Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday nights, however, to place such an obscure movie for the channel's specialty (e.g. war movies, documentaries, history related movies, etc.), I watched this movie mainly to see what the related "history" was in this movie.

Now onto the movie... I will keep you in suspense of what the History channel decided to relate this movie to. Face Off was not a bad movie... way better than John Woo's first crossover attempt in Hard Target (with Jean Claude Van Damme). I like the contrasting roles between good and evil portrayed by Nicolas Cage and John Travolta... and in comparison, Travolta does a better job at evil than Cage does at good. There's a great quote in this flick, which is still one of my favourites. I like the use of slow and fast filming techniques used by Woo and his framing of different scenes and setups of confrontations was good.

There are bad parts to this movie... the operation itself to change faces and voices really wasn't believable, even at this era of plastic surgery. Also, there is way too much focus on Cage's eyes... plus, he is crying way too much in this movie, especially an action movie. However, this is really consistent with Cage's acting abilities in most of his movies... so its not surprising he does it here. Also, I don't like that although Woo creates awesome action sequences, because he uses so much slow and fast images... you can clearly see the stuntmen being used during the slow images. This is a major detractor with an action movie... you really don't want to believe that a stuntman is doing that scene.

Overall, this movie is fun. I cannot complain about brainless humour. By the way... the "history" of this movie related to how in 1997, this movie talks about face transplant operation, which was recently completed in France in 2006. Now that's a stretch... literally!