Most of the best-known body-swapping movies are comedies, and many of those follow the age-gap pattern of Freaky Friday, a 1976 adaptation of the Mary Rodgers’ YA novel where a mother and daughter inhabit each other’s bodies for a day. The Rodgers novel has been remade by Disney multiple times, including a 2003 version with a new legacy sequel, and the late 1980s body-swap boom featured several male versions of that same basic story. Empathy is taught, lessons are learned, and everything works out in the end. Even the slasher version is pretty sweet-natured. Maybe it’s the formulaic nature of these often family-based stories that makes John Woo’s Face/Off an unexpected contender for the best body-swap movie ever made.
Technically speaking, FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) and maniacal terrorist Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) don’t actually swap bodies in this 1997 sci-fi thriller. (The movie doesn’t even appear on the Wikipedia master list of body-swap texts.) No one’s consciousness is magically displaced. When Troy, who killed Archer’s son years earlier, is comatose and captured, authorities use top-secret tech to remove his face and graft it onto a reluctant Archer. Archer can then convincingly go undercover at the prison holding Troy’s brother, to learn the location of a literal ticking time bomb that threatens to flatten Los Angeles. But as the scientists explain, they do more than give Travolta a freaky Nic Cage mask. They also re-sculpt his body and hairline to more closely resemble the more wiry Troy. Of course, Troy later wakes up and forces those scientists to perform the same operation on him, so he can wreak havoc disguised as his do-gooder nemesis.
The sci-fi stuff is used to convey that, for all intents and purposes, Archer and Troy now inhabit each other’s full physicalities. When Troy (now played by Travolta) encounters Archer (now Cage) later in the film, he laments: “I don’t know what I hate wearing more: your face, or your body.” Strictly speaking, this doesn’t make sense coming from Troy. (We know Archer had his “love handles” lasered away to look more like Troy. But did Troy force the scientists to somehow replicate Archer’s slightly heftier frame on his own body?) Yet it makes intuitive sense as part of a body-swap narrative. Troy and Archer aren’t just donning Mission: Impossible masks. They’ve switched places, physically and spiritually.
Woo’s famed Hong Kong action films often pit cop and killer against each other in stylized studies of duality (even if they sometimes wind up in alliance). So it makes sense that his American action movie that best replicates his Hong Kong sensibility also deals with that divide, with a sci-fi twist. Face/Off also performs a twist on the usual dynamics of body-swap movies, which tend to involve the switched parties looking at each other’s experiences with newfound empathy. That never really happens here. Instead, both men interrogate their own identities. Troy, disguised as the married father Archer, discovers that he’s able to enliven Archer’s marriage and even forge a stronger bond with his rebellious teenage daughter (even if it’s largely out of appalled boredom.) Archer, living as Troy, is more naturally caring towards one of Troy’s molls (Gina Gershon) and the young boy who turns out to be Troy’s son, which does highlight his own neglect of his real family.
Yet living through these circumstances doesn’t especially generate empathy between cop and criminal. The real Troy remains psychotic, and the real Archer still wants to kill him. By screenwriting rules, this should make the characters static. But that’s impossible in the face of the performances from Cage and Travolta. Neither actor is particularly known as a shape-shifting mimic, but imitating each other is only part of the job here. Woo and the screenplay are asking for something more complicated, and both of them deliver.
Cage establishes Troy with his trademark over-the-top nuttiness, entering the movie dressed as a salacious priest and rhapsodizing about “eat[ing] a peach for hours” before gleefully killing Archer’s colleagues whenever he has the chance. Once the switch happens, Cage is Sean Archer underneath, but still acting like Troy to avoid any suspicion in prison — which basically means he’s acting like Travolta, imagining how the other actor might impersonate himself. He captures some of Travolta’s mannerisms, particularly how he moves his hands, while in other scenes he riffs in ways that are still highly Cage-specific, as when he gets into a snarling prison fight and briefly segues into crying in anguish at the violence he’s supposed to be committing with such gusto. When the need for such showy deception falls away and Archer-as-Troy goes on the run, he looks more haunted, in a way that feels like some other character altogether: less repressed and obsessed than Travolta’s Archer, not as gleefully sadistic as Cage’s Troy.
Travolta’s version of Troy, on the other hand, doesn’t have to work as hard to disguise himself as Archer. (Or, perhaps more accurately, he refuses to.) As with Cage’s performance, Travolta finds ways to connect his acting to his co-star; certain fanciful intonations of his more mocking dialogue do sound like how Cage would say those lines. There are other times when his imitation of Cage reads more like Jim Carrey. Yet that doesn’t feel like a failure on Travolta’s part. In certain ways, the actors have each other’s styles down cold. What they also understand is that both characters will undergo a funhouse-mirror-style warping as they attempt to “be” each other’s arch-nemesis, creating weird hybrids of their personas. In this realistically solipsistic reading, swapping bodies doesn’t create automatic empathy for the other person. It creates an existentially slippery identity crisis.
Archer does actually reckon with that sense of self. But while Troy is forced at one point to comfort the grieving mother of a child he accidentally killed, he treats his altered point of view mainly as a novelty, which means he eventually grows tired of it. He’s only momentarily distracted from his murderous ways to the extent that he doesn’t plan to kill Archer’s wife or daughter right away.
The fact that cop and killer look mostly at themselves, rather than each other’s experiences, is reflected in Woo’s variation on his own signature shot, where two characters extend their arms to point guns at each other in a standoff of mutually assured destruction. In Face/Off, Travolta and Cage do the classic version, but later in the movie they revisit it with giant mirrors situated between them. For a moment, they’re both pointing guns at their own images, hesitating over whether to pull the trigger, unsure of what they’ll hit when they appear to be taking aim at themselves. What would it mean to annihilate a version of the self?
The movie isn’t all contemplation, of course. It’s also a slam-bang Woo thriller with multi-vehicle chases, explosive shoot-outs, and a lot of choice hamming from its marquee stars. The more comedic body-swap movies only offer the hamming, with little-to-none of the firing two golden guns whilst flying through the air. But amidst the mayhem, Woo makes the crucial acknowledgment that switching perspectives won’t automatically lead to healing relationships and increased understanding of others. In the world of Face/Off, identity is malleable, and self-reflection is the only way to regain your proper shape.
