Face/Off

John Woo’s 1997 film comes from a spec script Mike Werb and Michael Colleary wrote in 1990 and set in the future, which is how the face transplant explained itself. Woo threw the science fiction out, saying he wanted more character and humanity and that too much of it would cost the drama. Producer Barrie Osborne said dropping the future setting cut about twenty million dollars off a script heading past a hundred million. It circled other pairings for years: Stallone and Schwarzenegger, Douglas and Ford, Baldwin and Willis. Woo watched John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966) in preparation. Animatronic duplicates of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta were built for the surgery scenes; the speedboat chase took four weeks in San Pedro, second unit included. At the 70th Academy Awards it had exactly one nomination, Sound Effects Editing for Mark P. Stoeckinger and Per Hallberg, and Titanic took it. Test screenings settled the closing; Woo had shot a more ambiguous ending, unused. The trick is mutual mimicry: each actor plays the other’s mannerisms, so an inattentive first act leaves the second with nothing to land on. A good fit if you sit through a long setup reel before the swap the premise promises begins. Not for anyone who needs the transplant to survive past the one scene that waves it through.