A new Honest Trailer for Face/Off spotlights the craziness of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta switching identities. When it comes to A-list actors in Hollywood, few have had stranger career paths than Cage and Travolta. Both men have been nominated twice at the Oscars, with Cage winning for 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas. Both have at various times been considered one of the biggest stars in the world, and both have turned in performances so good that they’re impossible not to respect.
Yet, both Cage and Travolta have also appeared in a cavalcade of films that are truly awful, with both earning Razzie nominations for their work. While every actor - no matter how talented - has at least a couple underwhelming films on their resume, Cage and Travolta have signed on to more than their fair share, with Cage especially earning a reputation as someone who’ll agree to play pretty much any role he’s offered.
One of the craziest projects in either Cage or Travolta’s respective careers is definitely 1997’s Face/Off, the stateside debut of legendary Hong Kong action director John Woo. While films in which two characters switch identities were by no means a new concept by 1997, Face/Off’s conceit took the scenario to a whole new level of oddness, with Cage and Travolta’s characters both undergoing surgical procedures transplanting the other man’s face onto their own body. With Face/Off’s 20th anniversary just having recently passed, the folks at Screen Junkies gave the film the Honest Trailers treatment, and things get just as crazy as one would expect. Check the full video out above.
As fun and enjoyably action-packed as Face/Off is, there are many easy targets for humor, and the Honest Trailer doesn’t miss a single one of them. Perhaps the biggest logical knock on Face/Off - and this is admittedly common to many stories where plastic surgery changes a person’s identity - is why exactly anyone was fooled by the switch for very long, especially the wife of Travolta’s character Sean Archer. Just because one’s face looks like someone else, doesn’t change their body, and both men have quite different physical builds and identifying features.
Still, the enjoyment factor of Face/Off has nothing to do with logical consistency and everything to do with Cage and Travolta chewing the scenery like it was made of particularly flavorful gum, and the Honest Trailer does acknowledge that too. As it points out, everything makes perfect sense if the viewer is on lots and lots of cocaine.
Source: Screen Junkies
