Paramount Pictures Set to Reboot John Woo’s ‘Face/Off’
Written by SOURCE on September 10, 2019
On Monday, Deadline reported that Paramount Pictures is set to reboot the 1997 John Travolta/Nicolas Cage face and body swapping classic Face/Off.
The studio is set to shoot the film with an all new cast, and Deadline adds that Oren Uziel will pen the script. Previous/announced credits for Uziel include Cloverfield Lane, 22 Jump Street, that upcoming Sonic movie, and (in the future) Detective Pikachu 2.
As for the original, the idea sounded totally bonkers, but it ended up being a worthwhile watch in part because the two actors in lead roles were perfectly cast for such an insane premise. In it, John Travolta plays an FBI agent consumed by an obsession to catch a terrorist played by Nicolas Cage, who also happened to kill his son. Travolta ends up getting facial transplant surgery to look like Cage for the sake of going to prison so he can learn where a bomb is and prevent it from blowing up. At the same time Cage (who had been knocked into a coma) awakens and takes the face/voice/life of Travolta’s original character. Cage (as Travolta) then taunts Travolta (as Cage) by telling him that the surgeons who gave him his face have been killed and he’s now stuck looking like his least favorite person on the planet. After that there’s a lot of action (did we mention it was a John Woo flick? No? Oh, well it was) and also the movie made more than triple its $80 million budget.
This is not to make Oren Uziel at all nervous, but there’s some pretty high standards to live up to here.
