The story, such as it is, goes like this: John Travolta plays Sean Archer, an FBI agent who's obsessed with catching Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage), a terrorist who killed his son six years earlier. The movie opens with Castor being captured and knocked into a coma--amid the first of way too many insane gun battles--but it turns out that Castor has planted a bomb somewhere in Los Angeles and only his brother Pollux knows where it's hidden. In an effort to get Pollux to talk, Archer undergoes a surgical procedure to give him Castor's face and voice and then enters prison and tries to trick Pollux into telling him where it is.

This is all bad enough, but it gets even worse after that. While all this is going on, Castor wakes up from his coma, calls some of his buddies, and forces the FBI doctors to give Archer's face to him. Then he kills the doctors and blows up the clinic, thus erasing all evidence of the switch. Archer, inhabiting Castor's body, will spend the rest of his life in prison and Castor takes his place as an FBI agent.

None of this is handled very well, and the rest of the movie revolves around Archer's attempts to escape from prison and convince everyone that he really is Archer, not Castor. The problem is that the screenwriters don't even bother trying to plug the obvious holes in the story:

• Why was the bomb set to go off more than a week after it was set? This allowed time for the surgery to take place, but there was no other excuse.
• Why didn't Archer ask to see his lawyer and then offer to have his fingerprints taken? After all, they didn't cut off Castor's hands and sew them onto Archer's body.
• Wouldn't it have been pretty easy for Archer to demonstrate some knowledge that only he could have?
• Is it even remotely credible that the FBI would do this switch and that only two people in the whole world would know about it (Archer's boss not being one of them, by the way)?

And on and on. None of it makes any sense, and there's even a woman who knows all about the procedure and could help Archer but who disappears from the story without a trace. I finally got fed up at about the 90 minute mark, in the middle of a terifically long, frequently slow motion, gun battle from which no living being could possibly have escaped alive (except, of course, that almost everyone does). It just goes on and on and on and has absolutely no point, even to fans of random violence and cinematic gun fights.

I was expecting more from Face/Off, but it was a tedious disappointment. Lots of bullets, no story worth telling, weak characters, gaping plot holes, and way too long. Avoid it.

One interesting note for fans of DrumNet: Archer's son (the one who was killed by Castor) has a birthday of October 19, the same as mine. Fascinating, no?

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