On Screen
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen THE DOGS OF SUMMER By Raphael Shargel Face/Off is so full of smash and scream, fire and blood, anger and tumult that it frequently lapses into incomprehensibility. Its characters...
...Archer agrees to undergo reconstructive surgery and pose as Troy in the prison where his brother is incarcerated...
...Its characters and plot threads, like those of The Fifth Element, Con Air, Speed 2 and the other violent action movies of this summer, are insultingly inconsistent, as if narrative were a pointless yet unavoidable obstruction to the mayhem...
...They fight not to accomplish any public good but for their own selfish concerns, usually revenge or self-preservation...
...They are so loud and fast, the viewer cannot process their information in several sittings, let alone one...
...But over the years the objectives of the supervillains have become increasingly petty...
...Recognizing this eagerness, action producers have discovered a way to make emptiness lucrative...
...since 1993, Woo loads Face/Off with his trademark arsenal of ponderous camera tricks...
...The best of the James Bond movies felt lighter than their hardware because seemingly impossible stunts were executed with a glib ease that almost had you believing them...
...In fact, the film is more than half over before it inaugurates the cat-and-mouse game between exchanged identities that is promised by its title...
...He violates Archer's house with enough malicious abandon to destroy a stable and happy family, much less a dysfunctional one...
...Both films represent their outlaws as monstrous, but it is only after the heroes take the law into their own hands that innocent bystanders die...
...Ten years ago, in movies like Die Hard, they were high-class blackmailers...
...So much time is wasted jumping between the two moods that the plot can only progress in fits and starts...
...The script is bipolar too, vacillating between scenes of brooding despair and hysterically orchestrated shootouts...
...The current shoot-'em-ups are grueling, distancing experiences that drown in their own laboriousness...
...It is not only the scripts that are halfbaked...
...Once Troy's features are fixed on Archer, now played by Cage, he trots off to prison to confront the brother...
...His family life is a shambles...
...They owe far more, though, to other derivatives of those directors' techniques, particularly the cult cinema of Hong Kong...
...In Face/Off, Cage's Archermurders dozens of policemen when he escapes from prison, and many more when Troy tries to catch him...
...He is famous for excessive use of slow motion to prolong his beloved shots of bursting flames and shattering glass...
...The heavy-handed camerawork crushes whatever cartoonish appeal is attempted through costuming or production design...
...Woo, segueing into his Sirkian mode, cranks up the slo-mo, turns on the elevator music, and overexposes the light behind Archer so that he is bathed in an angelic glow...
...The hero of the film, again played by Cage, takes control of the cockpit and radios them to hold their fire...
...It is the work of the pre-eminent Hong Kong action director, John Woo, whose credits include A Better Tomorrow, Hard Boiled, and the quintessential example of the genre...
...The pilot then crash lands on the Las Vegas strip, killing hundreds...
...The film has been touted for its virtuoso performances, and Travolta does play both his roles with some slyness...
...Twenty years ago, in films like Black Sunday, they wanted to terrorize the United States...
...In the case of Face/Off that is hardly surprising...
...Like a roller coaster, they titillate and exhaust just enough to make their customers eager to get right back on again...
...At the beginning of Face/Off supervillain Castor Troy, played initially by Nicholas Cage, murders the young son of supercop Sean Archer, played initially by John Travolta...
...The ads for action movies often describe them as "thrill rides," and that is exactly what they are, dizzying experiences virtually devoid of genuine emotional or intellectual content...
...But this summer's offerings promote their cardboard characters and dumb stories with deadening earnestness...
...Thirty years ago, in the Sean Connery Bond pictures, the villains wanted to take over the world...
...As for the tough guys themselves, they are so intent upon testing one another's virility that they don't have time for anything else, not even sex...
...These films thus achieve a satisfaction that is very rare in real life: total closure...
...But at the end of the film, after Archer has chased Troy throughout the city, beaten him repeatedly, and finally shot him to death with a harpoon, Archer returns transformed...
...In past years movies such as True Lies and Mission: Impossible have featured delightfully intricate plots, suspense that built in complexity, and a visual panache that demonstrated a healthy sense of their own absurdity...
...And, indeed, they get sequence after sequence of big men vaulting through flames, firing rocket launchers and lobbing grenades at each other...
...As the plot of Face/Off makes abundantly clear, Woo is fond of the doppelgänger theme, but the only way his painfully unsubtle cinematic imagination can promote it is by making his characters look frequently into mirrors...
...At once combining and dismissing the motives of his film ancestors, Castor Troy describes himself as a terrorist for hire who likes to blow things up because "it's fun...
...Later in the film, Troy steals Archer's face, murders everyone who knows about his transformation, and impersonates him while Archer languishes in prison...
...They were made in Hong Kong on much tighter budgets than his latest effort, but their ratio of barely motivated carnage to thin, awkward narrative is the same...
...The pace and style of this summer's "thrill rides' are indebted to the balletic violence in serious films by Sergio Leone, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and Sam Peckinpah...
...The villains of Con Air are a group of insane convicts who hijack a plane and try to fly it to South America...
...All this could have been entertaining, a gruesomely comic spin, perhaps, on John Frankenheimer's somewhat similar and harrowing Seconds...
...If there is any wit in Woo's films, however, it is laid on with a trowel...
...In the process, they are often much more ruthless than the bad guys...
...By contrast...
...They are so monotonously repetitive, they would seem to appeal solely to the kind of audience that never tires of listening to one joke...
...During the course of the film, Troy, wearing Archer's face, invades his home, romances his wife, flirts with his daughter, and later tries to kill them both...
...Adversaries invariably trade threatening remarks while pressing pistols into each other's throats or chests...
...All the dangers we witness are eliminated by the villain's brutal, cathartic death...
...The Killer...
...In their heyday, action movies were also spy thrillers and the plots capitalized on our political fears...
...When villains are driven only by their own demented logic, when the lives of the innocent have no value, and when the alleged "good guys" always win out, there is no cost to the heroes' success...
...When he tries to escape from the city, Archer apprehends him in an extended violent battle that ends with Troy in a coma...
...Filmmakers have found a more seductive cinematic formula: The movie that is all climax...
...His daughter appears, conservatively made up and dressed...
...Today's villains, when they arenot volcanoes or dinosaurs, are simply crazy...
...Cage's Troy is a manic, bug-eyed, swiveling hipster, while his Archer is merely sallow and sulky...
...In the U.S...
...At least once in a Woo film, characters leap into the air, a gun in each fist, firing at the enemy...
...With the simplistic crassness that marks this summer's action movies, Face/Off'is calculated to gratify an audience that believes in the restorative benefits of vengeful hatred, vigilante justice and capital punishment...
...Police attempt to shoot down the aircraft...
...He has nothing to say to his daughter, who dresses in slutty black leather, wears clownish eyeliner, and sports a nose ring...
...Early in Face/Off, after Archer has committed Troy to a prison hospital, he returns home...
...Beaming with happiness, daughter and wife rush lovingly into his arms...
...The best of the genre still assure us that something of universal value is at stake, that there are valid reasons for the killings they depict...
...But Face/Off, affecting grand tragedy, dwells endlessly on the agony Archer suffers once Troy assumes his identity...
...And nothing less than his death will do...
...To learn the bomb's location...
...Worse, the directors and cinematographers go to great lengths to show how hard they've worked, how much money they've spent...
...In one of the silliest movie scenes in recent memory, doctors cut around Travolta and Cage's faces with lasers, pluck them from their heads, eyelids and all, and drop them into vats of transparent goo for safekeeping...
...The protagonist of The Killer, in love with a woman he has accidentally blinded, hires himself out as professional assassin in order to pay for her expensive restorative surgery...
...Moreover, there is a heartlessness at the center of the summer crop of action movies that extends to the heroes...
...Some of the director's fans contend that his juxtaposition of bathetic story lines with excessively violent gunplay is an ironic deflation of both the soap opera and the action flick...
...Years later Troy, still at large, plants a deadly time bomb somewhere in Los Angeles...
...Woo has an affection as well for subplots so maudlin they would make Douglas Sirk blush...
...Woo would have us accept that the obliteration of Troy has also obliterated all the evil he ever caused, and that Archer's vendetta has secured for him all the peace and love he could ever desire...
...These films are aimed at young, impatient males who want to see tough guys at war...
...After Troy wakes from his coma, he pulls the bandages from his head to reveal a face that looks as if it has been smothered in grape jelly...
...Since the death of his young son, he has been estranged from his wife...
Vol. 80 • July 1997 • No. 12
