Director: John Woo
Cast: John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Joan Allen, Gina Gershon
Have I Seen It Before: Never. I always suspected that there was a reason for that.
Did I Like It: The virtues of the film are encapsulated in its poster. Take two movie stars—and both Travolta and Cage were at the top of their star-power post Pulp Fiction (1994) and The Rock (1996)* and allow them to play both the virtuous (possibly to the point of insanity) hero and the scene-chewing villains. If only the Batman series could have offered Michael Keaton that same deal, he might never have hung up the cowl.
And then there’s two and a half hour beyond that pitch where you’ve got to fill. Perhaps the delineation between Sean Archer and Castor Troy isn’t all that well defined, ultimately. Both of the main characters seem to randomly find a moment or two in the course of day to have a complete emotional meltdown, and never quite for the reasons you might suspect. Or any reasons. At all.
This might be forgiven, if not completely ignored, if it weren’t for the fact that the action movie surrounding this conceit is a little pulse-less. It’s not even remotely as innovative as Woo’s efforts before being swallowed whole by Hollywood**. It’s not even the kind of guilty pleasure one might get from watching Michael Bay’s bloated music videos of the era. There are plenty of films that came to exist merely because it was a good business deal/ego-trip for the parties involved, but few that feel so obviously mired in that initial decision and no others.
*I am by no means equating these two films as a matter of quality, just in their collective ability to allow Cage and Travolta to make whatever film they wanted.
**We all—Woo included—could have enjoyed a lot less confusion over the next several years if he could have gone back to Hong Kong before Mission: Impossible II (2000).