It's been a lean few years for action films in America. It seems like every second film from Hollywood is an action epic of some kind, but the quality is so poor that Renny Harlin is considered a master of the form and the middling Con Air is hailed as a minor classic. There are good directors of the genre in Hollywood (notably James Cameron, John McTiernan, Steven Spielberg, and - from Australia - George Miller) but they are either out of form or no longer working in the genre. With the possible exception of Jan de Bont, I can't think of anybody of that standard who emerged in the US in the nineties. As any true action fan knows, the real classics of the form in the last few years have been produced in Hong Kong. The most famous of all the Hong Kong directors, and arguably the best action director in the world, is John Woo.

Woo left for America after making the justly acclaimed Hard-Boiled with his favorite star, Chow Yun-Fat, in 1992. In America, he made Hard Target with Jean-Claude Van Damme, only to have the film largely ruined by an involuntary re-edit. He then moved on to Broken Arrow, which was okay, but still seemed hampered by the demands of American censors and the difficulties of working inside the Hollywood system. With Face/Off, however, he has well and truly hit his stride. If there is a better actioner this year, then... well, who am I kidding? There won't be.

The plot, for those few who care about such things, is completely over the top. Mad bomber Nicholas Cage has planted a bomb somewhere in Los Angeles shortly before being captured (apparently dead) by the police. In order to trick Cage's brother into confessing its location, obsessed cop John Travolta takes on Cage's face through cutting edge surgical techniques. Things go awry when Cage awakens, steals Travolta's face, and then sets about taking over his life. This is all preposterously unbelievable, of course, and the lack of credibility makes this slightly inferior to Woo's Hong Kong work, which had more integrity. But it's a great setup for an action film. Both lead actors excel themselves, giving performances that clearly took a lot more preparation and thought than they would normally put into an actioner (compare Cage's work here with his performance in Con Air!).