8. Face/Off (1997)
I remember reading the pitch for Face/Off in a movie magazine, about a year before it came out, with utter joy: 'John Travolta plays a character who has his face surgically removed and swapped with that of Nicolas Cage's master criminal'. It just needed the words 'with hilarious consequences' and it would have summed up this wonderfully mental actioner. Early on, the now Nic Cage-ified Travolta, played by Cage as if he's Travolta being Cage (keep up) finds himself in Erewhon prison. Hang on? Isn't that almost 'Nowhere' backwards? Why, you crazy screenwriters? There's a good reason for that of course, because once Nicjon TravelCage has scaled his way out of a brutal prison where they beat you with electric sticks while you wear massive magnetic shoes (scarier than it sounds), he finds himself in the middle of the ocean on an oil rig. Oh, and that's guarded by a minigun-toting helicopter gunship of course. So all you need to do is avoid that, dive 200 ft in the sea, and swim the unspecificed miles to shore, and you'll be just fine. And then get your face back of course. Not the scuzziest prison in the world, but bat-droppings crazy enough to make sure I never park on a double-yellow line in a John Woo film, face transplant or not.