New on DVD
It’s hard to remember now the whooshing sighs of disappointment from his fans that greeted John Woo in 1996 when, after so many half-steps and mis-starts, he made his big Hollywood debut with the stolen-nuke thriller Broken Arrow. Toning down his trademark mix of ultra-violent flourishes and teary-eyed humanism, Woo concentrated on doing a by-the-book mid-’90s action flick that was generic in the extreme but raked in the money. The next year, though, Woo proved it had all just been an extraordinarily canny maneuver to allow him to make Face/Off, possibly the greatest, and definitely the most exuberant, action film to come out of the studio system in that decade.
Face/Off came out this week in a nice 2-DVD special edition. The full review is at filmcritic.com.
