Paramount's remaking Face/Off, as if it can improve upon perfection

By Randall Colburn  |  September 9, 2019 | 9:53pm
Aux Features Film
Paramount's remaking Face/Off, as if it can improve upon perfection
Photo: Archive Photos (Getty Images

They remade Poltergeist and we balked. They remade Aladdin and we laughed. Now, they’re remaking Face/Off. And we riot. Deadline reports that Paramount Pictures has hired one of the Sonic The Hedgehog screenwriters to reboot John Woo’s absolutely perfect 1997 action thriller. Have they considered just eating a peach for hours instead?

Face/Off, lest you forget, tells the story of an FBI agent and a domestic terrorist who, in a totally feasible medical procedure that would definitely work, get their faces and bodies exchanged, causing everyone in their orbit to think one is the other and…well, you get it. It’s the perfect blend of cuckoo and self-serious, with Nicolas Cage and John Travolta devouring the scenery and Woo staging every gunfight as if it were a goddamned opera. It made $245 million globally, and we were all the better for it.

The only good thing about this news is that we’re now wondering which actors we’d love to see adopt the other’s mannerisms, just as Travolta and Cage did for the original. Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt? Tom Hanks and Robert Downey, Jr.? Honestly, just make it Michael Shannon and Walton Goggins and we’re sold.

 
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