Face/Off Reviews
Time Out
Top CriticWoo's poetic-kinetic style has evolved, if not to the point of abstraction, then to delirium: he makes a virtue of incredulity.
Globe and Mail
Top CriticJohn Woo's Face/Off puts the acting into action flick...
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Scenes of high-voltage action vie with wild hilarity as two guys with guns switch faces and identities.
| Original Score: 3/4
It's difficult to describe the jolt his films deliver when [Woo]'s on, and he is on with a vengeance here.
Watching John Travolta and Nicolas Cage square off and literally exchange roles brings back the old-fashioned pleasure of astutely judged movie star pairings in a major way.
Here comes a mega-movie that actually delivers what mega-movies promise...
It could be argued that this movie's callousness toward human life is nihilistic and nasty. But Woo takes everything so absurdly far that audiences laugh at what horrified them moments before.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Most enjoyable blockbuster of the summer.
You see what thickets this plot constructs; it's as if Travolta adds the spin courtesy of Cage's personality, while Cage mellows in the direction of Travolta.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
...it is as elegantly made as it is violent, mating movie mayhem with bits of poetry, opera, psychology and the abstract.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
This is grand moviemaking with grand acting.
| Original Score: 5/5
TIME Magazine
Top CriticWith Face/Off, John Woo, the Hong Kong auteur (The Killer, Hard Boiled), has made his smartest, wildest, positively Woo-siest American thriller.
If there has been a major Hollywood release with a higher body count, I don't remember it.
Florid, passionate, frequently hilarious and loaded with messy emotions that nobody in his or her right mind should even attempt to explain, it's operatic in its nutball intensity.
