John Woo's Face/Off: Style, Allegory, and Hong Kong Cinema

Introduction: Woo's American Career and Face/Off

John Woo's 1997 Face/Off was only the Hong Kong filmmaker's third American feature, preceded by Hard Target (1993) starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Broken Arrow (1996) starring Christian Slater and John Travolta. Travolta would star again in Woo's third Hollywood effort alongside Nicolas Cage. The film's solid success with critics and at the box office would move Tom Cruise to hire Woo to helm the second installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise. But that film would prove to be the apex of Woo's success in America: his next two films would draw scant positive reviews and poor box office receipts.

By that time, Woo had traded his inimitable style for more overtly transcendent themes of sacrifice and spirituality: Windtalkers heavily embraced both Christian and Native American spirituality, and Paycheck (based on a Philip K. Dick story) was more psychologically driven than action-oriented. What made Woo so beloved by American fans was his highly stylized and choreographed shoot-outs, which combined intensely transcendent imagery with graphic and excessive violence. Face/Off, perhaps more than any other of his American films, exemplified the John Woo style of filmmaking — seemingly blending the crime genre with ballet — and was a forerunner to the wave of Hong Kong and kung fu films (such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix) that followed. This paper examines Face/Off and describes what made it an essentially unique film in the Hollywood canon, inspiring a new direction in cinema.

Hong Kong Narrative and the Roots of 'Gun Fu'

Had John Woo not first established his beautifully choreographed, bullet-flying sequences in films like Face/Off, it is possible that the Wachowski-directed sequences that mesmerized audiences afterwards would never have been inspired. Woo's Face/Off ushered in an era of fantastic gunplay coupled with acrobatic skill and nuance. However, this American film was merely an extension of what Woo had already been doing for some time in Hong Kong cinema. Woo had been combining genres since the 1980s, but had always infused his films with his own brand of blood, humor, and pathos.

Woo had, in fact, already staged the famous guns-pointed-at-one-another's-faces scene in his 1989 film The Killer, which Gerald Mast (2006) has described as being about two "unusual" professionals "whose guns almost never run out of bullets" (p. 501). The original title of the film offers some indication of the sensibility behind it: literally translated, it is A Pair of Blood-Splattering Heroes (Mast, p. 501). The same title could almost neatly apply to Woo's 1997 Face/Off, in which the hero and the villain literally swap identities through a facial transplant, each getting to play both roles — and, as is a trademark of John Woo's work, each is truly "blood-splattering."

That is precisely what made moviegoers love Face/Off so much: it brought Hong Kong cinema to the American screen. Hong Kong action films were very different from their American counterparts. As Mast puts it, whether they are gritty and gory or sentimental and magical, whether they are gangster stories or fairy tales or martial arts spectaculars, these films "defy the limits of space and time and endurance and even gravity in a realm of impossible wonders where dreams turn real, wounds never kill unless they bear a thematic charge, 'perpetual-motion editing' keeps sorcerers and combatants pin-wheeling and sweeping through the air for minutes on end, spells work, honor matters, style and skill are one, and every action and skill is an expression of good or evil" (Mast, p. 500).

East Meets West: Cultural and Cinematic Hybridity

This description applies to Hong Kong cinema broadly — but it also applies to Woo's American film Face/Off, which is a tale of good and evil in which the plausible is traded for the magical, the laws of physics are traded for poetry, and symbolism is woven into the very fabric of the film. Face/Off introduced Western audiences to the Asian concept of moral rightness and wrongness, and the almost balladic fashion in which the two forces combat one another.

Woo's Face/Off is a blend not only of genres but also of cultures. East meets West just as much as kung fu meets cops and robbers, creating what might be called John Woo's "gun fu" — in which macho men fight not with swords, staffs, or fists, but with guns and bullets, exercising dexterity and suavity as they do so. It is an interesting blend of two cultures as they each define the warrior's code through action: in Asian cinema it is expressed through style and skill; in Western cinema it is expressed through force and the ability to handle large-scale explosions.

Kung fu — the Asian warrior's code in which Good opposes Evil — meets the Wild West, where what is good and what is evil is not always what one might assume. While part of the magic of the warrior's code lies in the hand-to-hand nature of the combat, suggesting something ancient and noble (like Greek warriors in single combat before an entire army), part of the strangeness of Hollywood action cinema is its heavy reliance on guns and ammunition — weapons of mass destruction. As Siu Leung Li (2001) points out, "kung fu itself as a Chinese tradition 'naturally' lends itself to the construction of amour propre and the invention of the Chinese nation. Stallone and Lee's bodies embody different ideologies respectively: Rambo's a construct of Reaganite cold-war rhetoric; Lee's an imagined collective identity against imperialism and colonization" (Li, p. 526). In one sense, Woo's Face/Off is a combination of both Rambo and the Dragon — but in another sense it is also a deeply spiritualized representation of the Western concept of Original Sin.

Conclusion

Woo's Face/Off successfully blends a number of elements — East and West heroic paradigms, cinematic genres (Western gunplay with Eastern kung fu, creating John Woo's "gun fu," where the shooters twirl and dive and move with guns and bullets rather than knives). The film also allows two actors to explore both the good and evil possibilities of human nature through a script that forces the two characters to swap identities. The Christian themes tie the warrior's narrative together with suffering, good and evil, and Original Sin. But what makes Face/Off truly spectacular is its melding of action with ballad — intimating the wave of Western cinema that would bring Hong Kong style to American screens for years to come.