Woo had worked on two Hollywood movies before Face/Off: 1993’s Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target and 1996’s Broken Arrow, a fun but formulaic chase thriller that is probably best remembered now for inadvertently giving birth, for better or worse, to Ain’t It Cool News. Neither film is without its low-rent charms, but they were both classed as serious disappointments after the likes of The Killer and Hard Boiled, whose achingly beautiful slo-mo sledgehammer symbolism ,and furiously choreographed violence, felt epochal for action movies in the ’90s.

After the commercial success of Broken Arrow, however, Woo was trusted to impart a little more of his trademark flair on proceedings with Face/Off. On top of this, he also received several gifts in the form of a higher budget, a deceptively smart script, and two of the least inhibited actors in Hollywood.

In a tale not so much high-concept as I-can’t-feel-my-face concept, John Travolta’s tortured FBI agent Sean Archer has been engaged in a battle of wits with demented pervert terrorist Caster Troy (Nicolas Cage) for many years. This is after Troy inadvertently murdered Archer’s young son in an assassination attempt gone wrong during the movie’s opening credits. The conflict looks to be over though once Archer puts Troy in a coma, but then the revelation of a catastrophically huge bomb buried somewhere in Los Angeles leads Archer to make the questionable decision to undergo experimental surgery and have Troy’s face appended to his, so he can go seamlessly undercover as the criminal mastermind and root out the location of the bomb from Troy’s cohorts. Of course it’s not long before Troy wakes up from his coma, steals Archer’s face for himself, and all hell breaks loose.

Most cat-and-mouse detective stories have fun with the well-worn cliché that cop and criminal aren’t so different after all. But like every single aspect of Face/Off’s production, there is little room for subtlety and suggestion, so what is usually subtext gets ripped out from under the floorboards and painted on the walls in block capitals.

Somehow it works, because after the initial exposition scenes (which are dealt with so perfunctorily and quickly as to almost be apologetic) this lunatic conceit is explored in a series of ways that are at worst dramatically interesting and at best genuinely clever. One of the key things that separates Face/Off from its Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay contemporaries is its interest in its characters. While the action set-pieces are fantastic, the bulk of the film is spent exploring the consequences of the face swap either through Freaky Friday fish-out-of-water comedy (Troy as Archer teaching his daughter how to shiv a groping boyfriend) or Kafka-esque existential horror (Archer as Troy realizing he’s trapped in prison as his nemesis sleeps with his wife).