"Face/Off" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCI, Dublin
Like so many non-American film-makers lured to work in the US, the Hong Kong action virtuoso John Woo seemed to have fallen victim to the compromises and caution emblematic of the Hollywood system. Some flamboyant action sequences apart, there was little about his first US features, Hard Target and Broken Arrow, to compare with his finest Asian movies, The Killer and Bullet In The Head.
Third time round, with Face/ Off, Woo achieves a synthesis of his most vigorous Hong Kong thrillers and the production values of the big-budget, star-driven Hollywood movie. The result is spectacular, an adrenaline-pumping, immensely stylish and hugely entertaining ballistic ballet which powers along at a breathless pace for over two hours and never flags for a moment.
It opens six years in the past with a slow-motion prologue involving a dedicated FBI agent, Sean Archer (played by John Travolta) and his six-year-old son on a fairground carousel. Archer is in the sights of a sniper, the wholly amoral criminal, Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage), but the bullet hits the wrong target and kills Archer's son.
Cut to the present day and Troy has primed a lethal biological weapon that could destroy Los Angeles, but the villain, though captured, is in a coma, and Archer has to find a way of getting Pollux Troy, brother of Castor, to reveal the location of the massive bomb. Here the audience's willing suspension of disbelief must come into the play as the solution involves radical surgery after which Sean Archer wears Castor Troy's face.
The snag is this: while the Troy-impersonating Archer goes into a maximum security prison to coax information out of Pollux, the faceless Castor Troy comes out of his coma and just happens to find Archer's temporarily removed face and orders the surgeons to turn him into Archer. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and so is the bomb.
Confused? Fear not. Face/Off brilliantly sustains its wildly imaginative proposition of a psychotic bomber and an FBI agent exchanging faces - even though it does get rather mind-boggling remembering which man is which for the duration of the movie.
That, however, is part of the stimulating pleasure of Face/Off, and the reason it works so well in this respect owes much to the very clever performances of Travolta and Cage, who clearly enjoy playing out each other's body language. with Travolta, who had so little to do as the driven villain of Woo's Broken Arrow, relishing the juicier of the two roles in Face/ Off. One shudders to imagine how this role-playing would have worked with less subtle actors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, who were originally mooted to Archer and Troy.
This audacious narrative, scripted by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, is coated in some of the most dazzling action sequences ever seen on the screen, a hectic succession of shoot-outs, explosions and chases, and stunning stunts as gunmen fire as they fly through the air. There is a delirious, visceral quality to its gloriously over-the-top action which is indelibly stamped with John Woo's trademark stylised violence, off-the-wall humour and unexpected poignancy. It all left me reeling as I left the cinema.
"Up On The Roof" (15) Savoy, Dublin
This inane, cringe-inducing British attempt at romantic comedy could be dismissed merely as unspeakable, but I guess you need to know more than that. The movie spans three decades in the lives of five friends who first meet when they're involved in an a cappella group while at Hull University in 1979.
The confident Scott (Adrian Lester) is studying music and in a relationship with the sensitive Bryony (Amy Robbins), an art history student. The introverted politics student, Angela (Claire Cathcart) is as unlucky in love as in her final exams. The happy-go-lucky Keith (Daniel Ryan) has taken anthropology at college, and a lot of drink to fill him out. And the energetic Tim (Billy Carter), who sounds like he's from Belfast, cheats his way through his geology exams.
All five share the same house, but anyone expecting the wit, neatly interconnected plotting and vivid performances of the much-missed This Life series will find that Up On The Roof has little else in common. Its episodic structure hops through the years, meeting the characters again in 1985 and yet again in 1994.
The result is, inevitably, sketchy, in what is essentially three serious-sitcoms stitched together without any significant character or narrative development, and the hapless actors rarely get to their elevate their roles above cliche-type. And whenever the movie runs out of ideas, which is regularly, writer-director Simon Moore contrives to have the five burst into harmonious song. When crowds appear out of nowhere to cheer their rooftop rendition of the eponymous song, I felt like crawling under my seat.
