A once-in-a-lifetime great idea of combining two of the strangest American movie stars at the peak of their interest in exaggerated experimentation, giving them a legitimately deranged sci-fi melodrama spec script involving literally wearing each other like a skinsuit (roleplaying and performance-swapping in a dance-like yin-yang explosion of bizarre cadences/mannerisms... Arguably, this is the most acting that's ever been done in a movie), and giving them both to one of the most supernaturally gifted action filmmakers of all time who had already spent a decade honing this exact type of operatic cop/criminal mirror-image, opposites-colliding romance-action concept, and is able to just openly flex at how perversely literal the idea has been made here. Baking considerations about identity crisis & creation and performance/image into the very text itself and then having Woo heighten their violent rivalry and gruesome transformation through his expressively destructive controlled chaos pageantry (where slow-motion sparks, glass, squibs and falling/wire-pulled stuntmen all become painterly-balletic tools) in a way that somehow manages to take this increasingly absurd situation as emotionally seriously as it possibly could be. Despite the gargantuan, nearly 2.5 hour runtime it somehow still feels paced like a bullet, every reel escalating the knowingly ridiculous "I'd like to take his face... off" premise, relishing every absurd and perverse character beat of what each man does while briefly wearing the others professional/domestic life; all the comedic swagger/trauma the maniacal Troy inflicts on Archer's wife and daughter gleefully pretending to be a married supercop, and all the bizarrely unnatural mania of the grieving Archer pretending to be psycho terrorist (Cage acting as Archer remembering he's supposed to be acting like Troy is more subtle but arguably even more impressive than Travolta doing his near-perfect impression of Cage's expressionistic mega-acting schtick; "it's like looking in a mirror, only not"), but also letting the mask slip and providing some cathartic closure to some of his relationships. And then interrupting these moments with so many of the most beautifully photographed anamorphic maximalist stunt-action moments of the 90s they're next to impossible to catalog: the dummy that goes underneath the airplane tires as Travolta lands a helicopter on it and sends it exploding into a hanger, that massive leap Cage's stunt double makes from the futuristic magnetic boot Guantanamo Bay, that profile shot of Cage and Travolta literally shooting at each other through their own mirror reflections during the massive apartment raid (what a set!), the entire slow-motion hyper-cut church Mexican standoff followed by the boat chase setpiece that climaxes on two shots of boats catching ridiculous amounts of air and exploding, but the second one with the stuntmen also suspended in air with the boat flipping behind/propeller nearly hitting them is insane. At one point during that setpiece Nic Cage gets punched off of a speedboat and starts barefoot skiing... What else is someone supposed to call that other than one of the greatest movies ever made?Full discussion on ep 285 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.
