‘Face/Off’ has, for sure, the most preposterous movie concept you may ever see, yet it works so well precisely because it revels in its own panache. Other actors were in the frame to play the two actors who play the cop and criminal nemeses who literally adorn each other’s faces in order to more successfully capture, and endeavour to kill, them. Harrison Ford and Michael Douglas and later Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were associated with this project and the eventual pairing of Nicolas Cage (on typically manic form, fresh from his Oscar win for ‘Leaving Las Vegas’) and John Travolta (hot property at the time following his post-‘Pulp Fiction’ career revival) dovetailed well with the sensibilities of Hong Kong director John Woo who here brings his trademark flamboyance involving bullets, doves and Mexican standoffs to Hollywood.

Ostensibly, this is a film about the attempt to defuse a bomb that is going to detonate in the Los Angeles Convention Centre and wipe out the city’s population… but ‘Face/Off’ is really about the sanctity of family, with the different family dynamics of Travolta’s cop (whose son was inadvertently killed by Cage’s psychopathic assassin) the centrepiece of this visceral action movie, which gives Travolta’s on-screen wife, played by Joan Allen, a central role to anchor the drama and give gravitas to the surrealistic acrobatic and balletic flourishes. The plot sees some new, covert medical procedure whereby two men can have their faces surgically transplanted, giving full expression to the scenario recounted by Paul Badham and which forms the centrepiece of my Death and the Afterlife module according to which if we were to look into the mirror one morning and saw another person’s face staring back at us we would not question our identity.

For, it is not our physical bodies that makes us who we are – but, rather, our personalities, thoughts, memories and feelings which only require a physical body as a casing to contain them. We are our minds, not our brains. So, even though Travolta is inhabiting Cage’s body, and vice versa, we don’t have too much difficulty ascertaining which character is which – meaning that the cop is really the villain and the villain gets to sleep with the cop’s wife (and the mother of the boy he killed) while hitting on his teenage daughter. Crucially, though, both characters seem to morph into the bodies of the other, so that Cage ends up protecting rather than assaulting Travolta’s daughter, and Travolta seems to relish inhabiting the dark side of the man he has been hunting with obsession for years.

While this is ultimately an action picture, there is a rich philosophical streak running through it which asks what would happen if we became our nemesis, and lived our life through the face and body of our sworn enemy. How far we would be prepared to walk in the other person’s shoes? And would the experience change us? The film goes surprisingly deeper than one might expect. If not for ‘Face/Off’ we wouldn’t have had ‘The Matrix’ two years later. A classic.