10 Movies That Worked Despite Their Absurd Premise
2. Face/Off
Face/Off is so revered as a classic that it's easy to have developed a sort of 'absurdity-blindness' to its wild premise. Afterall, Travolta and Cage calling the shots in a zany action flick during the height of their careers is headline enough.
Beginning as standard cat-and-mouse fare, Travolta plays Sean Archer, an FBI agent with a personal vendetta, obsessively chasing Cage's Castor Troy, a ruthless terrorist. So far so 'any number of action movies from the 1980s to the 2000s'.
It's when the literality of the title comes in that the movie kicks it up a notch. Following a plane crash with Troy aboard, Archer pursues the truth by taking the only logical step: undergoing surgery to have his face replaced with Troy's in order to go undercover and unearth answers.
Troy awakens shortly after, forcing the surgeon to perform the same operation on him, giving him the face of Archer. What ensues is a less traditional game of mouse-and-cat, with Travolta and Cage afforded the chance to characterise these personas before then switching roles and personifying one another. Unbelievably, it made for hugely entertaining viewing, with action that delivered and a tone that lent into the ludicrousness of it all.