Face/Off is a 1997 American science fiction action film[a] directed by John Woo, from a screenplay by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary.
It stars John Travolta as an FBI agent and Nicolas Cage as a terrorist, who undergo an experimental surgery to swap their faces and identities.
[8] The film co-stars Joan Allen, Gina Gershon, and Alessandro Nivola, and features Dominique Swain, Nick Cassavetes, Harve Presnell, Colm Feore, CCH Pounder, and Thomas Jane in supporting roles.
[9][10] FBI Special Agent Sean Archer survives an assassination attempt by Castor Troy, a terrorist-for-hire, but the bullet kills his son Michael.
Upon revealing he has murdered everyone else who knows about the face transplant, Troy gleefully informs Archer that he looks forward to running his FBI career into the ground and ravishing his wife.
There, he meets Sasha, the sister of Troy's primary drug kingpin Dietrich Hassler, and her son Adam, who reminds him of Michael.
In the aftermath of the raid, Archer's supervisor, Director Victor Lazarro, angrily lambasts Troy-as-Archer for the unnecessary bloodshed he caused.
Meanwhile, after taking Sasha and Adam to a safe location, Archer-as-Troy approaches Eve and convinces her to test Troy-as-Archer's blood to confirm his identity.
After testing the blood and being convinced that the man wearing her husband's face is in fact an imposter, Eve tells Archer that Troy will be vulnerable at Lazarro's funeral.
Subsequently, Troy briefly takes Jamie hostage, but she escapes by stabbing him with the butterfly knife that he lent her earlier for self-defense.
After the face transplant surgery is reversed, Archer returns home, where he adopts Adam into his family, keeping his promise to Sasha.
Other cast members in the film include Danny Masterson as Karl, Myles Jeffrey as Michael Archer, David McCurley as Adam Hassler, Romy Walthall as Kimberly, Paul Hipp as Fitch, Kirk Baltz as Aldo, Lisa Boyle as Cindee, Lauren Sinclair as Agent Winters, Steve Hytner as Agent Howell, David Warshofsky as a bomb squad officer, and John Bloom as a prison electroshock technician.
Werb and Colleary were also inspired by the film White Heat to create a plot where the main character survived a prison riot.
[16] Various actor pairings were considered for the parts of Sean Archer and Castor Troy, such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Douglas and Harrison Ford, and Alec Baldwin and Bruce Willis.
[20] With an $80 million production budget, Face/Off made heavy use of action set pieces including several violent shootouts and a boat chase filmed in the Los Angeles area.
[28] Face/Off was released in North America on June 27, 1997, and earned $23,387,530 on its opening weekend, ranking number one in the domestic box office ahead of Hercules.
Critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four and remarked the basic plot concept was "utterly absurd", but Woo's inventive direction along with clever performances made the film entertaining: "Here, using big movie stars and asking them to play each other, Woo and his writers find a terrific counterpoint to the action scenes: All through the movie, you find yourself reinterpreting every scene as you realize the 'other' character is 'really' playing it.
"[34] Rolling Stone's Peter Travers said of the film, "You may not buy the premise or the windup, but with Travolta and Cage taking comic and psychic measures of their characters and their own careers, there is no resisting Face/Off.
[42] The concept of "bian lian" or "change face", a technique traditionally used in Chinese opera, may have been used here to depict the fluid and seamless morph of Chen and Lau's characters' identities between the "good" and "bad" sides.
Infernal Affairs in turn has spawned several adaptations, notably The Departed directed by Martin Scorsese, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.