But you’re still not having any fun!

After testing out the action waters with enormous success, Cage decided to join forces with arguably the greatest action director of our time: John Woo! A team up only the action movie gods could make possible, the sultan of shout combined awesomenesses (I just made up a word) with the king of two fisted gunfire himself. A dynamic match made in action movie heaven! That’s right. What better way to cap off your epic trilogy of supreme badassness than to be directed by the man who turned action into an art form. His operatic bullet ballets are sheer perfection. He directs like the reincarnation of Sam Peckinpah with a dose of Michelangelo and Fred Astaire. As you can see, I worship John Woo movies. And It all started with a little film called Hard Target…

From John Woo…

You see, Jean-Claude Van Damme was my favorite action star when I was a kid, so I was always hyped up when one of his movies came out. I remember almost having a heart attack when I first saw the trailer for Double Impact. “What?? Two Van Dammes?? This is the best thing ever!” my 7 year old self thought. So when Hard Target came out, I was begging my dad to take me to see it. And it did not disappoint. 9 year old me was completely blown away. But what’s crazy is… even at that age, I knew the action in it was different than other movies. Just in the way it was handled. Extremely precise. Practically surgical precision. The editing. The cinematography. The staging. Sublime in its execution. Next, I saw Hard Boiled. Good lord! Watching Woo in his element is like listening to Queen for the first time. It was like I had never seen action before. Then Broken Arrow, The Killer, and A Better Tomorrow, etc…

I became hooked on his movies. His output became my drug. So when I heard his next movie was going to star the Cage Man, as well as John Travolta, another one of my favorite actors, I became the rocket man and shot straight to the moon! (Pun intended) This was going to be an event like no other. And during June of ‘97, after the awesome fun ride that was Con Air, but also the incredible let down that was Batman & Robin, I was ready for some slam bang action goodness again. And I sure as hell got it! But first, let’s dive into what this sucker’s about…

Wheeee! What a predicament!

Cage plays Castor Troy, a very “eccentric” terrorist who is put into a coma during a confrontation in an airplane hangar with FBI agent Sean Archer, played by Travolta. However, unbeknownst to Archer, Troy has planted a bomb somewhere in LA which is set to go off in a few days. The only person who may have information regarding the bomb is Troy’s imprisoned brother Pollux, who will only speak to his brother Castor. So Archer decides to undergo a procedure that will place Troy’s face upon his, in a covert undercover operation in a state of the art prison to extract the information from Pollux.

Unfortunately, Troy wakes up from his coma, and realizing the situation, has the same procedure done to him with Archer’s face. He also destroys all evidence of who is who, and pretends to be Archer to the FBI and Archer’s estranged family. Now with no way to prove who he really is, Archer must find a way to escape the prison, so he can stop Troy and save his family…