Something very sad happened to me last night, in fact two things, one more serious than the other.Firstly my opinion was diminished in the eyes of my oldest son, he had previoulsy seen me as the font of all knowledge and my word was cast in stone, especially on all thing cinematic, secondly I had a treasured memory wiped out and replaced with bannal crap, and yes John Woo I hold you responsible on both counts.
The BBC was showing Faceoff, the former classic with Nicholas Cage and JohnTravolta about a super cop versus super villain who for some ludicrous plot line have their faces swapped and then use this or abuse this as the case may be. The memory I have of this film is slick action, dark humour and kick ass dialogue, I enthused about to to my son once I saw on my Sky+ that it was on, and he , for the reasons previoulsy stated took me at my word. Right from the start I was stumped, He asked why it was good and I explained about John Woo and his penchant for the violently dramatic and of course the birds, he quite rightly asked why the birds and I said it was cool, this was thrown firmly back in my face less than two hours later.
The start was OK, I remembered it as better but it was just the start and my son was waiting with not quite baited breath for something cool to happen, he was always one eye on his Ipad anyway but to be fair he did give it a go. I know this was a nineties film but I have watched some of nineties faves recently and thought they still stacked up so why would this be any different, I dont know but it was. The clothes etc were dated obviously and the subject matter was behind the times, this was all understandable , its 15 years old, but the storyline wasnt just bad it was stupid, the action sequences were like a stunt show with nothing approaching reality at any stage and the suspense of reality on the whole face swap stuff was mental, scars that heal in days, no appreciable height difference etc, as the doctor is speaking myu son is looking at me as if I was mad, ” did he just say they wouldnt be able to tell them apart just because they swapped faces? what about the body shape, head size and every other reasonable way they were different?” fair point which I couldnt argue with, but wasnt it about the idea of if this could be done, the tantilising premise that someone was so evil they would go to any lengths to screw their nemesis, and he was so stoic in his duty to the Republic he would forgo his own identity to stop a disaster, what would that be like?
Apparently not, as the over acting increased and the plausability of the action sequences got worse I had to admit I had remembered this as very different, what I had thought of as cool, slick and quite funny at times was just drivel, well cast, high budget but crap nonetheless. And dont get me started on the bloody birds, when they did make an appearance my son actually laughed at my previous boast of how cool they would be, they werent cool, they were silly and pointless and were a sad attempt to ass some artiness to the film. I was crushed by the stupid ending, the added shmaltz of adopting the villains child just about finished me off, my son was shaking his head as he went up to bed, my reputation tarnished. Now what do I do with my John Woo fetish, do I revisit the oldies and see how they stand in todays high quality market, would he be able to compare to the new Bonds and Bourne ? I dont think I want to do that, it may just spoil my whole week rather than just a few hours on a saturday night.
My reputation with my son maybe repairable, I have a high hit rate with our cinema outings thus far, but my own memories are not and this is my problem, I cant put this down to getting older, I still love the John Hughes classics after all, so it must have been a bad film on day one, in my humble opinion anyway, the wife, who missed last nights showing insists that its still a great film and I had such a high opinion of it when we went to the cinema. Can I have changed so much or was I just completely wrong on the night I saw the film, my wife assures me weve watched it on DVD which I dont remember, probably thankfully. It may be a simple case of having higher standards these days, after all there are some excellent films out there in this genre with very high quality stunts and violence, could it be that Cage and Travolta have done much better work and I’m comparing this unfavourably with this, I dont know and probably never will, I just know that Faceoff was a great memory that turned out to be a stone cold lemon, just hope this isnt a pattern and I can watch my old favourites with comfort, we’ll have to wait and see I guess
bigsteveg 