In case you don’t know what Face/Off is about (hold on to your face!!!!!!), it’s the story of a straight-laced FBI agent named Sean Archer who has to go undercover as his nemesis, master criminal Castor Troy. How do you go undercover AS somebody else? WELL, THE TITLE OF THIS MOVIE IS A CLUE, BUT I WILL TELL YOU IN A MINUTE.
We open in the past, when Special Agent Sean Archer is enjoying a nice carousel ride with his son. I have never understood what is so fun about a carousel, sorry. I already have a fake horse with a long pole that I ride around in circles for hours—it’s called YOUR DAD. Just kidding!!!! Your dad’s pole is only medium. Just kidding!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Don’t worry!!!! I am repressed!!!!!!!!
Sean Archer (John Travolta) is on the carousel with his son, and they have this positively pestilential face thing they do where Sean Archer drags his big unwashed mushy palm down over the kid’s entire face—eyeballs, nose, lips, teeth, and tongue. The kid loves it. They hug. Just then, Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage and, wow, his mustache) pops up and shoots Sean Archer in the back. Aaaaaaargh! Then some loose balloons drift away into the sky, which is international semaphore for “a kid died.”
It’s six years later. Archer survived the shooting, but if he had any good personality traits before, those tragically did not make it. To put it kindly, Sean Archer is an uptight lil weenie. He neglects his family and he is mean to his employees and he has no sense of humor and he is no fun. He only cares about one thing, which is crushing, killing, and destroying Castor Troy, and he is not even very good at that! Like, I can tolerate a workaholic with a shitty attitude if he is some kind of interesting genius (Sherlock Holmes2), or I can tolerate a big uptight dork if his devotion to his family comes into some kind of interesting tension with his job (Ned Stark). But Sean is a shitty boss AND a shitty husband! I hate him!
Meanwhile, Castor Troy is smoking a cigarette while dressed like a priest, which was the kind of edgy shit we incinerated our panties for in the ’90s. He’s an indie terrorist with extremely opaque goals (uh, being a bitch?), who is arming some kind of big sexy bomb in order to kill Los Angeles with it.
It is madness, by the way, that every director does not do whatever it takes—financially, spiritually, erotically—to put Nicolas Cage in everything they make. He is the only person who ever does anything interesting in any movie. Yeah, I said it! Do I mean it? I don’t know. But I do know that sometimes I forget about Nicolas Cage for weeks or even years at a time, and then I watch a Nicolas Cage movie again and it feels like coming home—to a house where your dad is cocaine and your mom licks your face if you’ve been good AND if you’ve been bad. I’m happy there!
Archer gets intel that Pollux Troy, Castor Troy’s little brother, has chartered a private jet, which can only mean one thing: Castor is at this very moment walking toward it in slow motion! What’s that??? The source also says he’s wearing a shiny maroon suit and the world’s worst tiny octagonal sunglasses!?!? This is more serious than I thought. The entire FBI races for the airport.
Castor boards the plane and starts sexually assaulting the flight attendant before they even take off, making her sit on his lap so that he can whisper what is scientifically the worst phrase utterable by the human mouth: “You know, I can eat a peach for hours.” This combination of sounds is profane even in alien languages from the coldest depths of deep space, and is actually used as an emetic by the worm lords of Xooxoo-12. If you say, “You know, I can eat a peach for hours,” in the presence of a gaseous one from Quabzab 971bb7cx80001, he will straight up ruin your face.
Archer gets to the airport and begins chasing the rapidly accelerating jet in his FBI car. On board, unaware that the feds are closing in, Castor is like, “Hey, if I were to let you suck my tongue, would you be grateful?” and the flight attendant is like, “YUM YUM, OH BOY,” and she does it!!! She does it! Even worse, it turns out that she’s not a horny flight attendant at all—she’s in the FBI. She’s an undercover FBI tongue-sucker! Are there really civil servants out there sucking terrorist tongues for my freedom? I didn’t ask for this! Castor shoots her.
It would be a real letdown if the last thing you did in your life was suck Nicolas Cage’s tongue. And I say that respectfully, as a fan.
Okay, I looked away from the screen for one second and John Travolta is somehow flying a helicopter.
Helicopter Sean shoots out an engine on the plane, so Castor kills the pilot, and now he will drive the plane himself. But instead he just crashes it into a building, which doesn’t help at all.
The FBI storms the hangar where the jet is on fire, so Castor jumps out of the plane sideways shooting his two golden pants-guns, which is absolutely the most functional maneuver and truly his only option at this point. Margaret Cho captures Pollux, which Castor hates, because Pollux is his baby, so he shoots many more FBI agents to death. A flawless operation.
Now Sean Archer and Castor Troy face off. It is just Travolta vs. Cage. (Chilling to remember that these were the two biggest movie stars in the world in 1997, which by my reckoning was about two weeks ago, but my kids have absolutely no idea who Nicolas Cage is and John Travolta is “the mom from Hairspray.”) The guys chase each other around the place
