Face/Off

A revolutionary medical technique allows an undercover agent to take the physical appearance of a major criminal and infiltrate his organization.

• Director:John Woo
• Genre:Action / Crime / Drama / Thriller
• Runtime:139 minutes

Cast

John Travolta : Sean Archer / Castor Troy
Nicolas Cage : Castor Troy / Sean Archer
Joan Allen : Dr. Eve Archer
Alessandro Nivola : Pollux Troy
Gina Gershon : Sasha Hassler

Public enemy number one and freelance terrorist Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) is being relentlessly pursued by FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta). Years earlier, Troy had attempted to kill Archer, who barely survived with a chest wound, but the bullet struck Archer’s little son Michael who died of his injuries.

Troy is recorded in the FBI files to have a whole list of terrorism-related offences, including bombings and political assassinations. The FBI receives information that Castor’s brother Pollux (Alessandro Nivola) has chartered a plane at a Los Angeles airport, and Archer knows the Troy brothers well enough to guess that Pollux “doesn’t fly without big brother!” Archer leads an FBI team in chasing the plane down a runway and is able to shoot out one of the engines. Unable to take off, Castor kills both the pilot and one of Archer’s agents, then crashes the plane into a hangar. In the ensuing chaos, which leaves several FBI agents wounded or dead, Pollux is captured by the Feds and Castor is knocked into a coma after bragging to Archer about a biological bomb that will destroy Los Angeles.

Archer initially believes Castor was bluffing, but after the FBI finds schematics for the bomb on a disk recovered from Pollux’s briefcase, Archer realizes that the threat is genuine. Although he learns the date of the bombing from several of Castor’s henchmen, including Castor’s bomb supplier Dietrich Hassler (Nick Cassavetes), Archer is unable to find any information about the location of the bomb itself. Knowing that the only way to obtain the location is from Castor’s brother, Pollux, Archer’s colleagues, Tito (Robert Wisdom) and Miller (C. C. H. Pounder), present him with a top-secret mission and convince him to undergo a surgical procedure to temporarily graft Archer’s face and pose as Castor in order to gain information about the bomb from Pollux. (Though the time-period is never specified in the film and largely implied to be the present, the technology shown here and later in the prison is partially anachronistic, contrasting with the technology used in the rest of the film.)

After the procedure, arrangements are made for Archer (as Castor) to be incarcerated with Pollux at the Erehwon Penitentiary (Erehwon being “nowhere” spelled backwards), where he convinces Pollux that he is Castor and learns the bomb’s location. Meanwhile, Castor unexpectedly awakens from his coma (it is implied this is a result of shock from the trauma of the surgery) and, realizing what has happened, calls his men to kidnap Doctor Walsh (Colm Feore), the doctor who performed the surgery. He then forces Walsh to give him Archer’s face. Read more

Watch full Face/Off online streaming for free