God Awful Movies - 539: Face/Off
Episode Date: January 13, 2026This week, our secular-tacular continues with a movie that is neither God nor Awful. The 1997 John Woo masterpiece explores the terrors of having to be Nicolas Cage and/or John Travolta. And almost ev...ery inanimate object eventually explodes.---To see us live in San Francisco, click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/god-awful-movies-live-in-san-francisco-california-tickets-1976632374642If you’d like to make a per episode donation and get monthly bonus episodes, please check us out on Patreon: http://patreon.com/godawfulCheck out our other shows, The Scathing Atheist, The Skepticrat, Citation Needed, and D&D Minus.Our theme music is written and performed by Ryan Slotnick of Evil Giraffes on Mars. If you’d like to hear more, check out their Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EvilGiraffesOnMars/Report instances of harassment or abuse connected to this show to the Creator Accountability Network here: https://creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org/
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jumps their boat with his boat.
It's, I can't, I cannot do it justice.
Somebody runs through the middle of this little river area with like an apple cart that's also a jet ski ramp.
Yep, yep.
And he just flies through a boat.
Pain a glass between them, yeah.
After having my apple cart knocked over by so many chase scenes, I'm so glad to finally sell my apples on the sea.
Oh, yeah, right, right, yeah.
John Travolta, why?
But so, but there's a boat's blow.
him right time.
God-awful
movie.
Welcome back to the GameCast
for each week we sample another selection
from Christian cinema or something else
if it's this month.
I'm your host, No Illusions.
And sitting 700 miles to my immediate left
is my good friend Heath and right, Heath.
Welcome back.
Face off. Face off!
I'm so excited.
Well, now all my other questions
aren't going to make sense.
Off.
That other...
Oh, this is the rest of the episode.
You can ask whatever questions you want.
Sorry, face off.
That other spoiler you've heard that came from 900 miles of my northeast is my bad friend.
Eli Bosnick, Eli, how are you this fine afternoon, sir?
Nicholas Cage doing a Nicholas Cage impersonation to Nicholas Cage.
Yep.
So tell us, Heath, what will we be breaking down today?
We watched Face Off.
We watched Face Off.
This is a 90s movie.
This is Face Off.
It's awesome.
It's the story of the greatest story ever told.
And that story, to be clear, is Nicholas Cage acting as John Travolta.
acting as Sean Archer, acting as Nicholas Cage, acting as
Caster Troy. I'm so excited. That's the story. Yes, it is. And
Eli, how bad was this movie? Well,
if you love the action movies of the John Wooniverse, and
you fucking do. Right.
The universe is fantastic. But you wish it contained more
John Travolta doing an impersonation of Nick Cage,
doing an impersonation of John Travolta. You will love this movie.
You will fucking do. You will fucking
love this movie. I have no time for
anyone who doesn't love this movie.
We gotta feel so pretentious to all the
listeners that are like, awful. It's not
God or awful. I see what you're doing
here, Heath. You give us Diana the
fucking musical while you're away, right?
And then you give us the 16th best popcorn movie of all
fucking time when you return. Okay.
All right. This, it's, it's so
good. It's just like pure
unadulterated id from
John Wu. It's delightful. Everything
delightful. It's the best, good, bad, best, best, best
best good bad. There's no bad. There's no bad. Yeah. And I
bullied myself every time I wrote a note. Every time I would be like, well,
that's not how that works. I give myself an topic. Right. I have
four fucking jokes in this nose. I don't know how we're going to do it. But it's bad as
in nothing makes sense for even one moment. Glorious. It's like God's light.
Which also doesn't make sense.
What's that argument where they're like slavery is okay because God said it's okay? That's how
I feel about face off.
Same.
All right.
So is there anything you guys want to nominate this one for Beath?
Be the worst out?
Best best for me.
Visible seething as John Travolta gets roasted by Nick Cage doing impressions of him.
It's the best.
He's so mad about so many lines.
He argued apparently about some of the lines and they got in anyway.
Oh, amazing.
Oh, 100%.
There's so many moments here.
Because look, look, and you can tell it to a lesser or greater extent, right?
So Nick Cage being closeted long time Hollywood gossip thing, right?
And so there had to be a moment at the table read the first time that Nick Cage was like,
Hey, everyone, John Travolta.
My chin doesn't make any sense.
I have an entire body shot inside of it.
Come on, John Travolta.
You know there was a moment where he, we'll talk about it.
You know, I'm ruining so much in the moment.
We'll talk about it.
We'll talk about it.
So I'm going to go with best words trying to write down the character's names in my fucking notes, right?
Because like what I would normally do in a movie like this is I'd be like, Nick Cage does this.
John Travolta does that or whatever.
But they switch characters halfway through.
So I've got all of these fucking fake John Travolta in my notes.
Because I'm not going to call him fucking Castor Troy.
I'm not writing Castor Troy in my goddamn fucking notes.
I did Cage Face and Trowlova face.
I saw that afterwards.
I'm like, oh, that makes so much more fucking sense.
Good system.
That was a good system.
Or like John Travolta Asterix would have been good, right?
Getting them nicknames.
Yeah, but you have to have a shift all the time.
It's too much, too much.
So I want to go with best, worst character motivations.
So there's no reason for anyone to do any of the things that they do in this movie.
Right.
So what you have to do is why do they do that?
Because they do.
That's why.
And every time anyone does anything and you go, well, why would they do?
That's not what they're, that's on you.
That's your.
vault for asking.
Booneerd, just watch the movie.
It's awesome.
Truly, it's Boon Nerd, just watch the movie.
And can I say, every time, we'll talk about it each time it comes up.
Every time I go, well, the character would do this.
It's because that's a worst movie.
That's no fun, man.
Exactly.
Don't be a dick.
Said John Wu to someone very much like making this awesome movies.
All right.
Well, we need a minute to figure out how we break down a genre-defining masterpiece.
So we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be.
back in a minute with all the glorious explosions that are face slash off.
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Hey, honey.
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A creepy voice telling me to check my window?
Nah.
All right, everyone. Welcome to the first ever writer's room meeting for our big action picture.
And can I say it is such an honor to be working with you, Mr. Wu.
Oh, you guys are too kind.
Thank you so much.
Doesn't John Wu have an accent?
Not in this sketch.
He doesn't.
So Mr. Wu, what are you thinking?
Okay, so it's a story about a cop and an international terrorist for hire who were enemies
because the terrorist killed the cop's son.
Sure.
Okay.
Yeah, got it.
But when the cop catches the terrorist, he accidentally knocks him into a coma.
So he needs to steal his face to convince that terrorist's brother to tell him where a super
important bomb is.
Wait, sorry.
Steal his face?
Yeah. Yeah, it's a new surgery that the government has.
The government has the ability to steal someone's face.
Yeah, and their voice too.
Okay. I guess.
Okay, but then, no, it gets better. It's way better.
Then the terrorist wakes up from the coma and makes the doctor who stole his face,
give him the cop's face, which he...
How does he do that?
Oh, he has a gun. He has a gun.
Wait, wait, so the doctor performs hours of...
surgery on him at gunpoint by him?
Oh, he's on painkillers.
Anyway, then the terrorist kills the doctors and everyone who knows that the cop isn't
the terrorist.
So now the cop who looks like the terrorist has to stop the terrorist who looks like the cop.
Got it.
That sounds entirely ridiculous.
Yeah, bonkers.
Oh, you guys think it's going to be bad?
Oh, hell no.
No, it's going to be awesome.
I just wanted to say that out loud.
Oh, okay, cool.
Can we have a boat fight?
Multiple boat fights.
Yeah.
Nice.
And we're back for the breakdown and we're going to open up with the accidentally
murdering John Travolta's son scene, right?
Which is amazing because it starts off with Nick Cage, like unveiling his sniper
rifle just in a park with a merry-go rounds.
I feel like somebody would say something, wouldn't they?
Yeah, but it's like a John Wu version of that.
And it's Nick Cage, so he throws the sheet off his sniper rifle, like a flamenco dancer with a flowy dress.
Yes.
I was going to say, if a bullfighter revealed something with this aplomb, I'd be like, little much.
Yeah.
A lot of panache.
Absolutely.
Now, this is mustachioed Nick Cage, which is worth the price of admission right there.
My God.
Tell you know it's the past.
Yeah.
They were like, hey, Nick, do something evil.
And he's like, got it.
And he had just a mustache.
And he, like, sexually sips his soda with.
a straw for a second and then does a murder.
Okay, so this is the first time I noticed, and it was very early on, that I was writing my
notes in advance of shit happening in the movie because I have this film memorized.
I want to be clear.
I have this movie on VHS.
I watched it on Netflix because, you know, you can't pause as often on VHS, but I have
this movie.
I know this fucking movie.
We got it just in time.
It's leaving Netflix.
Yeah.
I know.
Hop on it, everybody.
So, yeah.
So we see John Travoltavald, he's on the movie.
Mary Grown with his son, we see his signature finger drag across his kid's face?
A lot of finger drags in the movie.
It is the only characterization he will choose, right?
Because he's in a snit because of Nick Cage's impersonation of him.
And so the only quote unquote acting he will do is this choice where he face wipes people,
where he wipes his hand down from the top of their face to the bottom.
Yeah.
Do you think there was a moment early in the rehearsal process the first time John Travolta did that?
that someone sort of ducked down next to John
and was like, hey, are we going to tell him not to...
And he was like, I don't think anyone's going to fucking care.
And he's like, it's just so stupid.
And he doesn't like...
No, I know.
He does like 12 times.
But it's like...
The thing is, it's even worse than that
because it's like a vehicle in the movie, right?
It's how they're going to recognize him later.
So like...
It's fucking shaving a haircut.
Right. Travolta didn't even have this much characterization
for this character who was playing.
So...
But yeah, so...
But Nick Cage...
shoots him, but his bullet goes through John Travolta and hits the kid in the head and kills him.
And for whatever reason, Nick Cage decides not to just finish the fucking job, right?
Wouldn't you just...
Also, it's weird that the Merri-Go-round operator didn't stop the ride at that point.
It is odd.
You're going to have to get a bunch of refunds if you stop it.
No, I understand.
And that pipe-orban music is loud, right?
It's hard to tell gunshots from...
Oh, yeah, yeah.
From the inside of a carousel.
Falls dead from your carousel.
You can have back a half an arm's length of tickets.
How about that?
So now it's six years later.
And we see that John Travolta has just been in one steady seethe for the last half decade or so.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
That's what he's mad about.
Nothing else.
That's what he's mad about everybody.
He's seething.
And then also we're going to flash between him and Nick Cage, dressed as a priest,
setting a bomb at the L.A. convention center.
Okay, I want to make a bold claim here, and I would love to be corrected.
There's no reason for him to be dressed as a priest, right?
Nope.
Okay.
Yeah.
In his head, apparently, the character believes that a priest can just carry bomb stuff
into the LA Convention Center and everybody's going to be like,
ah, he's probably just doing a priest thing at school.
Yes, exactly.
Apparently, he brought in this giant, we're going to learn fucking nerve gas bomb.
And anytime anyone asked, he pointed it at it.
his weird dressy frock thing.
And they were like, I mean, how bad could it be?
Right, yeah, yeah.
But also, like, it's the stupidest fucking thing, right?
Because then he comes out and he starts, like, head banging to the, to the choir that's
there or whatever.
And I'm like, yeah, because when you're setting a bomb, you want to be as memorable as possible, right?
Really want to stand out.
I think this is just Nick Cage.
Like, he heard Honda's Messiah and he's like, I will need to crump and twerk right now.
Yeah, I will be crumping and twerking.
You can film it or not film it.
That's up to you.
That's between you and God.
But I will be doing this.
He also goes over and feels up a member of the chorus
does a bunch of weird sexy stuff to a member of the chorus.
For the younger listeners who haven't seen this movie,
this was not horrible sexual assault when it was made.
It was cool.
Yeah, yep.
This is how you establish that a character was a cool dude.
Oh my God, yeah, it was.
A real smooth man with the ladies.
Yep.
Terrifying.
Okay, so but just then, John Travolta and his team of cops
get a break in the Nick Cage case, right?
His brother has chartered an airplane.
Now, it could have been anything, right?
They could have built in a snitch or something like that.
But what they're going to go with and said is that the super criminal that they've spent
the last half dozen fucking years unable to find just chartered a plane in his own fucking name?
No, I get it.
Like sometimes we're at a live show and I'll buy like an M&M peanut bar.
And I accidentally swipe my card instead of the company card.
And I'm like, oh, man.
So, yeah, but they couldn't think anything for that.
So then Nick Cage, we get him arriving at the airport where he does the John Wu jacket cape thing.
Fuck, yeah, he does.
Caster Troy has a cape and a large gust of wind everywhere he goes in the world.
Right, he's got a time getting out of the car just right.
Wait, I'm getting back in.
I'm getting back in.
Somebody's going to win.
Look at the, look you, there's a wind sock right here.
It's a fucking airport.
Wind guy?
I'll fucking kill you.
How did John Wu know so many things would be cool before he made them cool?
Right.
Right?
Because I guarantee you if I was sitting around a pitch room and I was like, guys, jackets.
Everyone would be like, no, stupid.
That's never going to be cool.
John Wu just fucking made, he made birds cool.
He did birds blocking the shot.
Birds, yeah.
And the wind thing is great.
I wanted to see Castor Troy like, he's doing drugs later.
I wanted to see him like cutting up Coke and there's Augusta win.
And everybody was just like, come on.
Right, trying to light his joint.
Yeah, right.
You gotta come in after.
So, oh, and speaking of his joints, right,
they bring him, like when he arrives,
they bring him his boxo sin.
I pause the box of sin.
It's got a pocket knife,
different sunglasses, his road sunglasses,
a box of chicklets, right?
You need that.
A bag of blue pills.
A wizard's flask.
I wasn't really sure about that.
And three joints rolled so poorly
that if heatherai did that,
we would just rip them up.
and start over.
I was mad.
I was offended by how poorly rolled these joints.
Yeah, you hand me that joint.
I'm like, okay, we're putting that straight into a bung.
That's nothing.
You gave me a bag made of paper.
It looks like your grandma was given a joint to roll.
Yes, right, exactly.
Oh, sorry, it's also, then he pulls out his golden dragon money clip, right?
To, like, tease the guys that his henchmen about how, like, you know,
hey, they're also supposed to keep his brother from doing dumb shit,
like charging an airplane in his own fucking name.
In his own name as a national terrorist.
Yeah, FBI Most Wanted List guy.
Yeah.
So, okay, so they get on the plane where there's a sexy stewardess who we don't know yet,
but is a secret Travolta agent.
Okay.
This is the only moment, guys, let's radically open our hearts.
This is the only moment where I was like,
I remember this scene.
It's fucking cool.
and then modern me.
And then the tongue thing happened and you were like, fuck.
Was like, ah.
Yeah, I...
That's not cool.
Yeah, this is part of the sexual development of a lot of teens who saw this in the 90s.
It's really bad for the world.
It's really bad.
Yeah, this is the I Can Eat a Peach for hours scene where he says to the girl,
and I quote, if I were to let you suck my tongue, would you be grateful?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Whatever else you say, this woman's performance is Oscar.
She was, I don't know who won it this year, but it should have been her.
She finds a way to not answer the question and just get through the scene, yeah.
Yeah, yep, yep, yep.
Also, there's the, before he does the, like, I could eat a peach for hours,
she just says, can I get you anything?
And he says a peach.
And again, it's sexual innuendo, problematic, yada, yada, yada.
But this was the first time that occurred to me that a stewardess would have to be like,
we don't just have peaches.
There's not even like, I mean, there's not even like, I mean,
fucking cornucopia over you.
Four seconds of ripeness on a peach.
We're going to have that ready.
Do you want to delay the flight for four and a half hours?
Exit this airport for security.
Go to a whole food.
Buy a.
I just need you to really think this fucking through.
This all happened to Cash Patel on his plane with the FBI wants to.
I'll suck your tongue.
Your tongue's here and now.
There you go.
So yeah, so she sucks his tongue.
The plane starts to taxi.
But suddenly there's a hot.
Hummer on the runway, I mean the truck, and we get the first action scene of the movie.
Now, okay, guys, this is the act one capture scene.
I paused at this moment.
There are in this scene at this moment, four police cruisers, four Humvees, a motorcycle, and a helicopter chasing a private jet.
John Wu is a fucking treasure.
He's coming in hot.
He's coming in hot.
You know what John Wu is able to do?
You know how like Buster Keaton and then later Jackie Chan
would sort of create a clown slash action piece
around a single object?
Right?
Like Jackie steps into a mop bucket
and then he's using the mop bucket to fight everybody.
John Wu does that with like action set pieces.
He's like, okay, what are all the action configurations
of a Humvee and a helicopter chasing a plane?
Does the helicopter tackle the plane at one point?
He uses the helicopter like a bucket that tackles the plane.
Yeah.
Fucking amazing.
You could put me in a room with a thousand monkeys for a thousand years.
We would not come up with anything as close to as cool is.
No, but the helicopter tackles the plane.
So what's truly amazing about this is that fucking John Travolta starts off in a Hummer
and he moves from the Hummer to the helicopter while the plane is taxiing for takeoff.
It's not like moving into position for takeoff.
is in the middle of takeoff.
He gets out of the Hummer, into the helicopter,
and it catches up with the plane.
Yes, it does.
That's a hell of a helicopter.
And it goes for a tackle.
And then the plane basically like stiff arms the helicopter off.
Yes, it's the best.
Yeah, he lands on the flaps, right, and breaks the flaps.
And when that doesn't work, he shoots the engine out.
Badass, big explosion.
Everything's just, oh, and bullets are just rockets in this movie.
Oh, yeah.
Every bullet will blow up a square mile.
Or they're just.
fairy dust, right? You can shoot
3,000 of them and they do nothing
at all. Everything's a
fucking machine gun. Everything.
There's a, I almost went with
Best Worst Machine Gun because there's a machine gun
towards the end of the movie that's just too
ridiculous for anything, but yes,
everything's a machine gun. Yeah.
And of course we get the double gun
dive shot at one point.
Yeah. So, Nick Cage shoots the pilot
because he can't take off anymore. So what good is he?
So then he crashes him into like a
warehouse full of sparklers, right?
He crashes the plane into a sparkler warehouse.
And then he's got to get out of the plane
with all these bad guys in it.
So what does he do?
He obviously does the double gun sideways dive.
It's the best.
Yeah, he flies out, double gun dive,
classic John Wu.
And then I thought this was excellent.
Pollux, Castor's brother,
who's kind of like the nerd bad guy,
he has to dive out too,
but he does like just a single gun dive.
And it's stupid and it doesn't work.
And I was like, okay, that's three buddy.
That's why you got to do the double gun.
Duh.
Yeah, obviously.
Duh.
You've embarrassed yourself.
Mick Cage gets a hold of a shotgun at this point, and when you shoot somebody with a shotgun,
they fly up and away from you.
Yes, they do.
God.
Fuck, yes.
Oh, my God.
Imagine being such a good movie maker that you change how bullets will be represented in both
cinema and video games forever.
Oh.
And so, okay.
Forever.
Flies away like hit with a bubble.
bomb.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the bat from just a gunshot.
Yeah.
Blue shelled.
So, right.
So, but then we enter into act two of this action scene, right?
Because now they've got to chase him around in the hangar.
Mm-hmm.
This is where John Travolta keeps running through, like, seeing people that have the drop on
Nick Cage and yelling, down, down, get down, and alerting Nick Cage to that person so he can
shoot them.
Yeah.
And it's nice.
The building, this hangar at a private airfield, it's stocked with.
sparklers and then nothing else but video game objects.
Yes.
So it's like,
exploding barrels.
There appears to be a random jet engine.
Yes.
Sort of hanging out.
Operational.
There's the bit where like John Travolta runs to the chain and he shoots the
counterweight and grabs the chain and it pulls him up.
Oh, so badass.
Guys, my notes at this point are just pew, pew, pew,
co-bloom, capow, wham, sliding,
and chain shooting.
Yes.
Yes.
That's all my fucking notes right there.
Yeah.
So, but of course, this all ends with John Travolta and Nick Cage pointing their guns at
each other, but they're out of bullets, right?
The classic standoff that you have in action movies, right?
Oh, so good.
So now during their, before they realize they're out of bullets, though,
Nick Cage lets it slip that there's a bomb that's going to explode in L.A. very soon.
Yeah.
I like the one moment, so they do that, what, you know, one.
on one gun face-off thing.
But they just landed kind of on the wrong side.
So their arms are a little bit like they're both righty and they're like not not right
hand to right hand like easy way.
They're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, time out.
Switched to right.
Switch to right.
Yep.
Yep.
On three.
On three.
It would have been really funny if like as Nick Cage moved his gun up, Troultter just shot
him at that point.
But yeah, but so Nick realizes he's out of bullets.
He drops to his knees.
He begs for forgiveness while he's pulling a knife out from behind because he's.
a bad guy, right?
But John Travolta sees that coming,
kicks him into the path of a jet engine,
hits the button that turns the jet engine on,
because why would he not know which button turns the jet engine?
Of course, it's the red one.
I feel like it wouldn't just be like a button on the side, right?
Like, I can't, I don't know how jet engines work,
but like if there's a giant turbine,
there's not just like a red button that's like, oh, shit, she's, yeah.
Oh, that's, no, there is.
No, there is.
That's why the big engine wants you to say.
Mike Pence bumped the button.
Right.
The rocket's taking off from NASA.
So he kicks him into the path of the jet engine and it flies him down the tunnel and
hits him onto the cage.
And now Nick Cage hits the cage and he's taken out.
Right.
So, okay, that is the end of the opening bid for action sequences.
Then we have a real quick scene where we meet his family and he's got all these family
troubles that all the movie dads have, right?
Yeah, it turns out while he was hunting down these international.
terrorists. He wasn't spending enough time at home with his kid.
Yep. Yeah. And she started wearing black makeup one time because of that.
Exactly. I mean, this black makeup thing was tearing families apart in the 90s.
Oh, my God. Throughout all of Hollywood. Yeah. But then he explains to his wife that like he finally got Nick Cage and he can retire from the force and he no longer has to be obsessed with the job anymore.
And then there's a, he goes to work and everybody claps for him and he's like, guys, several of our coworkers died yesterday, like in the previous action sequence, right?
Grumpy, grumpy interaction.
We were all aware that our coworker died.
We just wanted to have a nice clap and a nice champagne toast over the dead body.
Yeah, the movie's like, well, he sure is a sour pusses.
I like that he was like, hey, hey, people died.
Oh, is that dumb?
That's dumb?
Okay, no, no, we'll do it.
It was a toast.
Yeah, no.
Start up that slow clap one more time.
So, for me.
But in the planes wreckage, though,
apparently they found a schematic of the great big bomb
that Nick Cage was talking about in the big confrontation, right?
So it turns out that the case isn't quite so closed as he hoped it would be.
That's, um,
I feel like he would have mentioned that Nicholas Cage told him that he had planted a bomb
in the center of LA.
Right.
that point, he's just like, oh, right, yes, you know what.
This is the biblical plague, the evil terrorist.
I meant to tell you.
We were doing the pointing guns at each other thing.
You understand C.H. Pounder is the character.
God, yes.
This is where we meet CCH Pounder.
She's the one that comes in and she's like, all right, well, there's one way we could find the bomb.
You could swap faces with Nicholas Cage.
Fuck, yeah.
Phenomenal.
And he's like, well, that's dumb.
And they're like, well, yeah, we hired this very smart-looking actor to explain it, though.
Maybe he's a guy from Armageddon that came up with the bomb idea.
Maybe he could help.
Maybe he has.
He's got the surgery thing.
Yeah.
And I know what you're thinking.
So the stakes of the movie right now, in case you're not following along, is that the brother, the nerdy brother, who did the jump bad,
he knows where the bomb is and they need to get it out of him by stealing Nick Cage's face.
And at this point, I wrote in my notes, I mean, I don't want to be that guy, but torture.
And I know what you're thinking, podcast listener.
Eli, there's significant scientific evidence
that torture doesn't work.
Oh, I was going to say ethically you shouldn't torture.
Well, that too, but it also doesn't work.
It also doesn't work.
But this is a movie.
And I don't know if you guys have seen movies,
but torture always works in movies.
That's why we keep doing it.
Yeah, if you're the good guy, yeah.
I'm pretty sure torture does work.
We just shouldn't do it.
Like, I know.
It doesn't work.
I've read stuff like that.
I've read, but I don't believe it.
I think if you torture somebody,
they're going to do what I.
You're like, they'll do whatever to get you to stop.
It seems to me.
But I have read all that.
Yes.
I'm so glad you said that because I wrote that joke and then I literally had the cognitive
business moment of being like, no, torture.
Of course that works.
That would be the worst.
You put something a foot away from my eye and I'll tell you anything.
Yeah, I had to read like nine guardian articles about how torture doesn't work.
And then I would still like.
People will just tell you whatever it is that you want them to tell you or they think
they want it.
I would tell the truth.
But also because you're in such psychological distress,
you'll start making shit up and not know what's true and what isn't.
There's also that.
There's a lot of reasons.
I mean, I'm sorry to kill the comedy, but like, yeah.
But just like don't torture, yeah.
Oh, this is also the point where, like, they show him this, like, plastic thing and
they're like, here's where the magic is, right?
We're going to take your face off and then we're going to put this plastic thing on it,
and it's going to make your skull look like his skull when we put his face onto it.
But so are we supposed to believe that there's just a big piece of plastic in his fucking
And, like, how is he eating through that or seeing?
How amazing would it be if just when they were revealed, his face just stuck out four inches in front of his face?
Hey, is your face like forward now?
No.
No.
So, but then, okay.
So, but the movie introduces this whole concept, but it's not ready to pull the trigger on it just yet.
Because it senses perhaps that we would think, well, come on, nobody would do that.
So we have to see everything else fail, right?
We get a quick scene where he like tries to interrogate the usual suspects, but that gets him nowhere.
He tries torturing and that guy shows him the three Guardian articles they read it.
Right, right.
And I'm like, I still don't buy this.
And it was like, oh, actually, you're not listening when I'm talking.
You need to pay attention.
You have to do a face off thing.
Yep.
But ultimately, that's where we land, right?
Ultimately, he tells his wife he's got to go back for one more job.
He can't tell her what it is.
That's important to the plot, not so much the story.
Okay, we're three married, gents.
Has anyone ever told you anything and you haven't immediately turned and told your wife?
Right, yes, exactly.
Something big, it's just like, oh, and, and, and, and, I'm often just copying and pasting the text as someone's sending to me.
As someone is saying, don't even tell your wife, I'm writing it down and showing it to her.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
So, right, but he doesn't because it's important to the plot.
So then we cut to the same.
right the wherein they swap the faces first we get like beforehand like his partner we got to meet his
partner tito and he's like oh this seems like a suicide mission and he says i don't know if that doctor
can do half of what he says he can do i'm like half you have half of nick's cage his face
the peace i feel like half would be the worst of all worlds but oh and at this point he also tells
the doctor's that he wants to keep his bullet
scar from where Nick Cage
shot his kid through him.
Yeah. Because he's still not over it.
Right? The doctor says, we'll take
care of those love handles and you see Travolta
be fucking furious. Okay.
Imagine. Off camera. There was
a day where John Travolta
called somebody and said,
hey, can we cut the line
where the movie grinds to a halt and points out
that I'm fatter than Nicholas
Cape? And that person
that hero
went
no
I'm John Wu
I have invented a universe
where you could put
someone's face
on another person's face
but no one's going to believe
that you're not a little bit
fatter than they can
so okay
so but then like
then we they draw their
outline
in purple marker
on their face
we have to cut it out
we laser cut the face
and then they just
sclorp it off.
It's so, the,
the biological picture
you have to have
of how faces are attached
to the, it's like, like
the snare drum is what,
yes, right, right. They're just attached by the forehead
and the cheeks. They're attached like
really, like far outside, like
toward the nose.
Way more than you would think. I'm
lucky that I haven't ever cut myself shaving
because I think my face might go
and sort of fold. And sort of
fold in like a Venetian blind.
So, yeah, you would think that they would droop at a certain...
Yeah, so they take his face off.
They put it in a little pool, a little lighted pool
where they keep the faces that they're not using.
Why?
Why would they keep Nage's face?
Again, it's the first time I wrote a thing and I was like...
Yeah, right, right.
But then, while he's...
Before they put the other face on him, they give him a haircut.
Yep.
Feels like that can wait.
I feel like that can wait until after the surgery, right?
Sorry, can we do the haircut
Before the gaping wound is open?
Or like way after?
I'm the secret government barber
And no one ever calls me.
I'm really excited.
You guys get to do secret agent surgery shit all the time.
No one ever needs a secret agent haircut.
It's my day.
Let the barber in.
But they also like shoot lasers at his hair
Because everyone watching the movie
Would recognize that there's no amount of cutting John Travolta's hair
That would make it into Nick Cage's hair.
So they also.
in some laser stuff.
Aren't them broads laser in the hair away these days?
Put it in the movie.
So there's also, the whole time they're doing this,
there's like a computer graphic next to them
showing like a percentage of Nick's Cage's face
that is now John Travolta's.
Like what information is that conveying to the surgeon?
Honestly, the computer, the graphics of the universe of computer graphics
within this film is baffling to me.
There's a lot of graphics.
Unnecessary graphics in this film.
Right?
Hey, boo nerd.
It's just lasers do whatever.
Shut up.
Lasers do whatever and sometimes your bomb has tits on it.
I get it.
There you go.
So, okay, so but then, so they unveil the bandages
and John Travolta's character
sees that now he's Nick Cage.
Okay.
The best, though, is when like the doctors look at it.
They're like, oh, hold on, faces.
It seems like it's like off to the side by a tiny bit.
Oh, yeah.
I'm going to squanch it with my hands.
I'm going to swash it? Too far.
Is it left?
My left?
My left?
It's tilted.
Yeah, like they're doing a painting.
It's the best.
Yep.
Yeah, so if they get it right, and then he wakes up and he's all, he like cries at the thought of being Nick Cage, which is probably easy to summon as an actor.
Yep.
Right?
We've all been there.
Oh, we get to see Nick Cage fascinated by his own face in a mirror.
It was just the casting is perfect.
Well, and then they have to deal with a voice issue, right?
They're like, oh, well, we attach to him.
microchip to your larynx and I'm like, how would that help?
There's also a laser.
Shut up.
There's a laser in my larynx.
No, because you got to, you say words and then he said words and now you're
to the right words.
Are the same.
Pay attention.
All right.
Well, we've faced off already.
So I think we've earned a break, but we'll be back in a flash with even more face
forward slash off.
Face off.
So you're just not hungry?
Pretty much, just never hungry.
Amazing.
Hey, guys, what you doing?
Oh, I was just telling Heath about my Zabound.
It rules.
It's Zepound.
The words on the side of the box, right?
Tomato, tomato.
Anyways, now that I'm a GLP baddie,
I want to get freaking shredded, you know?
Shredded.
Like, I want the shift in my appearance
to be really unsettling to the people
who haven't seen me in a while.
Right.
Right.
Well, I can't help you with that.
But if you want a great workout at your own pace,
you should try Fitbod.
What's?
What's a FitBod?
Ah, no fair, I was sulfur burping.
Heath gets the point.
Sulfurper burping.
Damn it.
FitBod customizes every workout and adapts as you improve to avoid boredom and plateaus on your journey.
That sounds great.
It is.
With FitBod, workouts adapt to your growth, so each workout is challenging enough to push you to make progress.
But have you actually tried it?
I sure did.
I tried FitBod when they first became a sponsor.
I love that I can get a workout in from anywhere no matter what available equipment I have.
That's why I, no illusions, personally endorse FitBod.
All right, Noah, thanks.
Too bad they don't make a shot for working out, am I right?
Oh, they do, man.
It's steroids.
Oh, I should get on roids.
Don't get on broids.
Hey, Noah.
You ready to start the next part of the show?
Heath, what are you doing?
Put Eli's face back.
What?
No, I'm Eli.
I'm mad at TikTok.
No, Heath, that is not going to work.
TikTok.
I'm a genius.
Look how genius I am.
Still not kind of.
work.
Damn, really?
What gave it away?
Well, Eli actually got here with your face first.
I can reach so many shelves now.
So many.
I'm reaching him.
Got it.
Actually, Eli gave TikTok up on New Year's Eve.
Good for you, buddy.
I gave it like four days.
Oh, yeah, four days max.
I was having his face helping you reach shells.
And we're back for more of this shit.
We're going to rejoin the action with Tito, the partner,
putting fake Nick Cage on the helicopter to the prison.
Oh, yeah.
And Cage is like, my face itches.
And the cop's like, yeah, man, because the implant.
Because you have a face implant.
There's a plastic above your face.
And then they're like, give me scritches.
I need scritches.
He gets some scritches.
And then they send him off.
He gets to the super prison, right?
Now, of course, we have to establish here that all the prison guards think he's real Nick Cage.
Only his partner in this very small cadre of people who did the surgery.
know that he's only fake Nick Cage.
Hope nothing happens to them, right?
Yeah.
Luckily.
Now, again, like, sorry.
Again, I was going to booed nerdy because I'm like, why?
What's the point?
Right.
Why is only having three people know that he's Nick?
It's fine.
Why wouldn't the boss know?
Yeah.
So why wouldn't his wife know?
Why wouldn't the prison guards know?
Yes, right.
Well, at least some of the prison guards know.
You can make the argument that, well, you know, you can't trust if some of them are on the
tape, but you could like at least two of them could know.
But anyway, this is where they explain the magnet boots.
Magnet boots.
Now, I want to point out that he starts off this scene naked, right?
He's standing in a room and he's naked and they're like,
your asses by and the Geneva Convention doesn't count over here.
Like it fucking counts anyway.
Yeah, I was going to say, it's a prison.
We get it.
You're a cocaine trafficker or whatever.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
We were allowed to double tap.
We also arrested your wife.
Yeah, right.
But then when they want him to be in magnet boots,
he's suddenly dressed and in magnet boots.
And the magnet boots are like,
he's got to carry around these giant moon boots all the fucking time.
And if they want to lock them down,
they can make him magnetized to the floor at any moment.
Yeah.
So the original script was apparently in the future.
And John Wu was like, no, it's just magnet boots and now.
That's what we're doing.
Yeah.
It works great.
Whatever.
Perfect.
Yeah.
Magnet boots and now.
Never forget it.
You don't.
You never forget it.
You say face off and you're like magnet boots.
Nice.
You're also not clear.
about why that would help?
Like, we see several times during the movie,
they, quote, unquote,
lock down the prisoners,
but then they're just sort of standing stiffly
while they do bad things.
Right.
Can we stop a fight by making the people
who are fighting stand close to each other.
There's a prison riot,
and they're just like, lock them all down.
I wanted to just see them all fight each other
next to the four people next to them.
Now we're just fucking rock them sock up, sock,
robots.
I don't really know what this is going to go.
So we see everybody clanking around in their magnet boots in the lunchroom.
You got to imagine this moment at like the guards union meeting where they're like,
hey, can we find a less clanky way of subduing our prisoners?
Really kind of tries to nuts.
We pad the metal.
Also, can we get like plastic stuff?
All my metal stuff keeps flying to the floor.
To the boots.
Yeah.
So, yeah, that would be good if their fucking feet were constantly stuck to the guy's badge or whatever.
Yeah.
But then Nick Cage goes through and a dude attacks him because it's time for more action.
God damn it.
Yeah.
So they're having like a little fighty fight
and he gets knocked over to near where his
quote unquote brother is.
And the brother looks at him like,
hmm, you're losing this fight.
Maybe you're Sean Archer
wearing my coma brother's face.
This is my normal face.
I'm going to do a suplex now.
Because the magnets are just medium.
So you can suplex people
and fly through the air.
It's fun.
Well, so yeah, he's got to fight like Nick Cage would fight.
So there's this moment where we get Nick Cage
trying to do Nick Cage face.
And nailing it.
Honestly, this is the high point
of Nick Cage's acting career, right?
That second where he's just like me
trying to look like me.
But I couldn't pull that off.
Could you pull that off?
Do you think Nick Cage knew
or do you think someone had to do
an impersonation to him?
Right?
Was he like, oh, no, I get it.
Nick Cage face.
And did it?
And they were like, oh, so you fucking know.
No.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, no.
No, no, have you seen it?
It's like this.
It's like your face is like this.
Ready?
It's like how Christopher,
you know how Christopher Walken can't hear
impersonations of him?
Have you heard this?
No.
I mean, I'd be exhausted if I was him in real life.
When people do Christopher Walken impersonations,
he genuinely doesn't get it.
Like he doesn't think he sounds like that.
Oh, really?
That's what I'm picturing happening to Nick Cage.
He's like, I understand.
I smile and they're like,
you know, you do like a, come on, Nick.
But then so he starts fighting the guy,
and then he yells,
I'm Castor Troy.
No need to doubt my actual identity.
That's whose face I have.
The amount of skepticism people have of someone with a face in this movie is only makes sense
if every character in this movie has seen face off.
It's an established floor.
We get that moment where he's like yelling like that.
And then he's just like, no, I'm weeping now.
I'm weeping for a second.
No, I'm yelling again.
I'm yelling again.
It's like, wow.
identity crisis.
Fuck, yeah.
But then he can't bring himself
to kill the guy that attacked him
so they do a magnet boot lockdown.
We don't get the Rockham Sock a moment
that we've so obviously deserve.
The guard is mad at him
for not killing the other dude.
Just one, like one pan over
and one guy just punches the guy next to him.
Just like, that would have been so good.
Right.
And they'd be like, oh, this doesn't work at all.
We need a magnet gloves would be better.
So, and then Nick Cage wakes up
in the hospital,
the real Nick Cage wakes up in the hospital facelessly, right?
The coma him now awakens and he's like,
what the fuck is going on here?
Ouchy.
You know how if someone undid the three ties that hold your face under your skull?
You'd be like, ooh, you know, like you wake up and you just have a weird scratch on your arm.
It's like that to not wake up without a face is what it's like.
Yeah, so he wakes up without a face.
makes a phone call.
Seems like that'd be trickier
than they're making it out to be.
Trying to hold it away from his,
I don't want it to stick.
Oh, God.
And he has a super awkward,
like the movie isn't,
like John Wu is not gutsy enough
to try to write the goddamn dialogue
of him explaining to his friend
that his face is missing, right?
So he's just like,
I have a weird story to tell you
and then the scene ends, right?
So then I guess his guy's got
and kidnapped the doctor
who put his face on Travolta
and make him put Travolta's face on him.
Now, you're probably thinking to yourself,
which guys will they know
or communicate with Nick Cage's other henchmen
that exist in this world?
No. These are like a separate henchman group.
This is the B crew that was with him earlier.
Yes, yeah.
Isolationist henchmen.
You got to see.
Silo your missions. You don't want people getting out with that information.
So, but then there's also like, they're doing this weird bit where like they don't want to show us faceless Nick Cage because it, you know, they can't make that happen to any reasonable degree.
Right.
So they're just giving, we see flashes.
We see him in the mirror.
We see him in reflection and shit like that the whole time.
Mm-hmm.
And you see him smoking a cigarette with no face for like half a second.
Yeah, seems like that would be tricky.
So he had a pack of cigarettes just like in his surgical.
gown that they let him keep? Apparently. Clearly.
The 90s.
So, yeah, there was just cigarettes everywhere back then.
Okay. So then, okay. So then Trowalta Nick Cage, god damn it.
Buddies up with Pollux, like fake Nick Cage, buddies up with Rio Nick Cage's brother, right?
Yeah. But of course, again, Pollux is like, wait a minute, how do I know that you're not an
undercover agent wearing my brother's face?
We're wearing my brother's face. What was my medicine?
We were kids. Your face-offing me, it should be how he
opens. Yeah, right. You didn't see me do that
suplex earlier? Fine. Whatever. Your medication was
Vivex. I yelled I'm Castro. But that's
why they needed John Travolta
to do it, right? Because nobody knew
Nick Cage like John Travolta did.
So when he says, what was my medicine when I was a kid?
He says, I knew that. I totally know that.
Right. He does say it though
in I just thought of something voice.
He does. He does. Right. Like when I'm having to go through
and confirm birthdays for a flight and I'm like,
your birthday is April
16th.
You're doing memory palaces?
No, I know
it off the top of my head. I was doing
drama. But this is
but this is of course where he
like he accomplishes his mission.
He goes, oh, that bomb that we built,
huh? The location of that thing,
eh? Hey? Let's both
name details about our plot. You go first.
Let's say where the bomb is on three. I said one.
You go.
Yeah, I know he goes, the bomb belongs
in the Louvre man and he goes, yes, shame, it'll have to settle for the LA Convention Center.
And then he's like, okay, that's enough conversation, bye.
Yep.
I was Sean Archer with a fake face on this whole time.
I just know your medicine, man, come on.
So, yeah, so mission accomplished, right?
So he goes to leave and they tell him he's got a visitor.
And he's like, well, it'll be Tito and I'll be able to like get out of here.
But it's Nick Cage wearing John Travolta face.
Okay, so to be clear, for the young people
who, for whom this movie was not formative
and are following along with us for the very first time,
Nick Cage kidnapped the doctors
who did all that surgery and the microchip
and the fucking haircut.
He got the barber to, he got the barber to uncut his hair.
Uncut his hair.
They did all of that with nobody finding out.
There are no one outside of like,
three people found out
while he completely transformed
into the second in command at the
FBI. Yes, yes. And then
and then he killed everyone involved
in a big fire. Yeah.
And that explanation that Eli just gave
also definitely had to be given to John
Travolta several times throughout this
to explain what the fuck he was doing.
100%. It was like, John, it's
you acting as Cage,
acting as Castro, acting as you,
acting as Sean.
Archer. And so
Trevolta comes in and he's like, so I'm bad guy.
Okay. And I'm Cage. Got it.
I'm going to sniff a newspaper.
Yeah, no, he nailed it. He nailed it.
I wrote at this point in my notes,
was I supposed to have jokes about this movie being bad because I don't have any?
And then immediately after I wrote that, he looks at Nick Cage and goes,
it's like looking in a mirror.
Only not.
And I wrote in my notes, okay, maybe I have a few jokes.
So yeah, but we've established the stakes.
He's like, I'm going to go rape your wife.
They're going to dangle.
He's going to rape the wife in front of us for a very long time.
And I'm going to live as you and you're going to suffer for all my crimes in prison.
Right?
That's the stakes of the movie.
Okay.
So then we get, he drives to home like John Travolta.
Fake John Travolta drives home to his place in suburbia.
And he fucking hates it, right?
Because he was a millionaire.
Playboy, drug dealer, whatever, terrorist or whatever.
Yeah.
This is where we get the first, like, oh, he's going to fuck that lady.
Well, she thinks he's a different dude moment.
Again, there are 26.
Right.
And Travolta has to do, like, sexy now.
The idea is he's, like, a little bit edgy and bad and sexy compared to the original character.
And the wife is going to be, like, real excited about that.
So Trouvault is doing evil Danny Zucco or, like, Vinny Barbarino.
It's so silly.
And he calls her my peach.
Now, first of all, I've never called my wife my peach.
I feel like if I started, she'd notice.
But I think she'd especially notice
if it was the seduction catchphrase of the man who killed our son.
Well, that's just the thing, too,
is that they're supposed to have been married for like, you know, 20 years or something.
Like, come on, like, it would take, like, 18 seconds for my wife to figure out,
hey, that's just some dude in a used suit, right?
As unlikely as that is, she'd be like,
Like, that's not.
You're doing a face off thing.
You did a face off thing.
You're doing a face off.
Even in a world without face off.
I hit you in the face with the hammer.
See?
It's a face comes off.
Well, right.
You have to hit it only in the three little spots.
The tie downs.
All right.
So, but then back at the prison, God, it's so hard for me to follow my own fucking notes because
of who characters are, right?
So fake Nick Cage realizes that fake John Travolta got the brother out of prison, right?
He's going to make a deal with him now.
So we cut to the FBI office
where Pollux Troy is like living it up on his deal.
The boss comes in.
Boss man is really mad at fake John Travolta
for cutting the deal.
I'm very confused by this boss man's thing.
He will, one, he enters the movie at all at this point.
He has not been in the movie at all.
He was apparently not aware of the face-offing plan
in any way, shape, or form,
which I feel like you'd want to run that up the chain
before you just fucking went ahead
did that, but he'll just be mad
for the rest of the movie.
He'll just be like, I don't like you.
I am a conflict for you in your
new role for some reason.
That's every boss at every
law enforcement agency in the history of films,
though, right? The next guy up
is always just mad, yeah.
You destroyed 20 cars.
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's that guy.
And he just comes in and he's like, you can't just
release criminals. You know what? That was your one.
From now on,
no more doing the plot.
Right. So, but he gets Pollux to, quote, unquote, tell him where the bomb is, right, so that he can go disarm it so that he can be the new hero. The motivation makes no fucking sense. But right, but like he explains it so that he can be the hero of America and that is good for him in some way. Yes. Right. So then we cut to the bomb site where he can disarm it, danceily. I mean, in fairness, like how would Nick Cage disarm a bomb? The answer is danceily.
You know that is fair.
For sure.
And this is the graphics that I was teasing
earlier podcast listener.
When he disarms the bomb,
Nick Cage is built in a
pornographic cartoon.
Yes.
You disarmed me sexy message.
So, to be clear, at some point,
a bomb maker,
arms dealer guy was like,
hey, bomb's all finished.
I got all done.
And Castor Tro is like,
add some boobs if anyone disarms.
Is there any spank material on this bomb?
Yeah.
If I undo this, once again, chemical weapon I'm planning to use to kill millions of people.
I want to see Tats.
Tia.
So then we cut back to fake Nicholas Gage, all sad at prison.
And he realizes that he needs to find a way to escape because we're all kind of getting sick of the prison portion of this movie, right?
Yeah.
So he turns to this lackey and he's like, you know, how do I get these booze?
off. He's like, oh, they only ever take the boots off when they drag you in to, like, do the torture that they do if you get in trouble.
He's like, oh, that seems like a terrible idea. That's when you'd want them the most, right?
He's like, yeah, believe it or not, that's when they take them off.
There's just no, we ran out of magnets for that room.
Right.
They need to do.
Budgets.
Yep.
So, yeah, so he realizes he needs to start a fight and get drug off to be tortured if he wants out.
So the movie wastes no fucking time in that.
I feel like the magnet boots thing,
somebody could sell it as like an exercise device
for like overload training.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
People walk around with like the weight vest.
The opposite of moon boots?
Yeah, yeah.
You know there's that thing where they'll like come up with an exercise trend
and then the next exercise trend is like,
you heard of CrossFit.
Turns out CrossFit's bad for you.
Now you got to do this thing.
We should invent opposite moon boots and their magnet boots.
Yeah, there you go.
So yeah, so but he starts a fight with a guard over a cigarette
because everyone smokes in 90s movies
or early 90s movies, I guess.
Because it was cool.
Yep, sure was.
Did I relate this fight to you
I had with my young cousins over Thanksgiving?
I don't think so.
Where they tried to pretend smoking wasn't cool?
We were playing like a fucking...
We can be honest.
It's bad and it's cool.
I was like, smoking's cool.
And they were like, no, everyone thinks smoking's not cool.
And I was like, you guys fucking suck.
Narc.
Boo, nerd, shut up.
This is why your motto's a number.
And of course, it's so cool that even when they drag him in to be tortured,
they're like, well, we should let him smoke a cigarette first.
Gotta let him smoke his cigarette, yeah.
And he uses that to burn the dude to get him out and to start the fight.
And they were also in the middle of torturing the guy who attacked him earlier.
So he ropes him in to be on his team as well.
So they're going to fight their way out together.
That guy joins up with Nick Cage, Caster Troy, very quickly.
Yep.
He's just like.
He basically yells to him, you're on my.
side now and the guy's like, you got it.
Yep. Why are you guys yelling about sides?
What does this mean? Nothing?
Okay.
None.
Stand closer to the sulfuric acid.
I'm going to put my arm near your cigarette.
All right. So this is where we're just checking action sequence boxes at this point, right?
We get our first dive roll gun pickup here.
We get the first hiding behind something that actually wouldn't give you cover.
Well, it's not the first, but we get one of those.
We get a literal explode bottle.
of sulfuric acid.
It sent sulfuric acid on it.
It's interesting.
We get a view into the architecture of this prison.
Baffling.
They have the zappy room.
They ran out of magnets, so they can't have the zappy room locked down from that security
perspective.
But they were like, hey, let's give the zappy room like a catwalk.
A couple of catwalks.
Like a henchman catwalk.
They're not going to fall off of it.
What are you talking about?
We're going to do a catwalk.
Let's also, okay, I know this is going to sound crazy.
somebody going to throw the sulfuric acid jar that we keep lying around up there and shoot it?
We should have a gallon, just one gallon of exploding stuff.
A bus in our room is the first happening?
I know you said we needed some sulfuric acid for the prison.
Pin in what we're going to use that for.
Okay, we'll just leave it here for now.
Incredible deal if we buy in bulk.
I'd really like you to consider getting the full gallon.
It comes in a milk jug.
Does you get the receipt?
this is the other thing that this is a great thing that's established here, right?
Because got to remember, Nick Cage is fake Nick Cage, so he's a good guy,
which means he doesn't want to kill the prison guards, right?
And so we get a lot of like Batman doesn't kill kind of disarming of the cards here, right?
Like, sure, he blows up a thing of sulfuric acid, but that just...
In their faces.
Stings.
Yeah, right, right. Yeah, it doesn't kill him.
At the end of the movie, he's restored, these two guys with melted faces are like,
And then he's like, oh, right.
Sorry about the...
You're alive, though, because you're good guys.
We got a really good deal on it.
Hey, do you want to see if any of the henchmen from earlier have faces you could have?
I got a guy.
I got a guy.
It's just for me.
I'm the only one that can have that operation.
So, yeah, but so they climb up to the security computers or whatever, him and the guy who's now his sidekick.
And, of course, he knows how to unlock everything with this.
He's familiar with this computer system because why wouldn't he?
Yeah.
It's the head of second command of the FBI.
That's what you do.
He just jumps up onto the computer of the whole security system.
He's like, I'll disable it with some long form typing.
He types like 250 words of pros.
And all the securities then.
So as he's doing that, by the way, the other dude, the guy that joined up with him like falls.
There's a moment where he falls off and Nick Cage tries to save him, but he can't quite save him.
And I'm like, does this movie think I'm emotionally invested in that character?
in that guy?
In DuBah?
The guy from the fight earlier?
Yeah.
Oh man, did Dubov fall?
Yeah.
He falls.
And a guard shoots him on the way down,
which seems vindictive.
Rude.
But ultimately, Nick does get out.
And it turns out that the prison is
just in the middle of the ocean,
so he can't get away.
Yeah.
Oh, no, wait.
No, sorry, it's only looks like that.
If you look that direction,
the other direction, it's actually,
it's just offshore.
They show us the land like
50 yards away.
A accident at one point.
But yeah, he gets out
and he's on the roof.
He's actually on the helipad
on the roof of this like
floating prisoner or whatever.
And then out of nowhere,
a helicopter just
hovers up to fire at Cageface
there on top of the helipad.
Yes.
Where was the helicopter parked?
If not on the...
That's the security.
No. That's the security helicopter.
It parks and then it does a round.
Oh, the helicopter was just walking around
a catwalk.
And then it's...
If anybody comes up out of the thing, they know there's been a prison break and you shoot at those people right away.
There you go.
And then you just jump on the helicopter and then shoot the shell at the other helicopters.
And yeah, you're good.
Yeah.
But ultimately, he leaps into the water to get away, right?
So, okay.
So then we get fake Travolta.
He goes to the office and he learns that fake Nicholas Cage was fake killed and an escape attempt right there.
Like, oh, he died trying to escape the prison.
And he's like, where's this body?
I don't believe he's dead.
And they're like, well, you have no reason to think that we wouldn't have his body at this moment, but we don't.
We don't, though.
And he's like, I'm going to caress your face.
What if I caress your face right now, Margaret Cho?
It's Margaret Cho.
It is.
It is Margaret Cho.
I love when a real comedian, this was a beautiful thing.
Sometime in like 1989 to 2004, they just took real comedians off the comedy circuit and made them weird extras and action movies for no reason.
Just Pat and Oswald walking into the middle of fucking.
standing still in the middle.
Yes, exactly.
So yeah.
So, but then he goes, like, I'm sure he's dead.
And John Travolta goes, no, he's already here.
And then we cut to Nick Cage already being there.
Yeah.
He steals a car from valet parking.
And then he goes to see the A team henchmen, right?
They're siloed away from the henchmen that a fake Travolta is now using.
Now, here's the thing.
If I were a famous international terrorist and I had my A team and I woke up and was able to undergo major surgery to look like the second in command of the FBI, I'd let my friends and family know.
I'd be like, hey guys.
Yeah.
Great news.
Right.
Right.
Like, I understand why there's no one to help fake Nick Cage.
I don't understand why there's no one to help fake Sean Archer.
Right.
No, that's it.
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Sorry, before he gets to the, before he can get to the other henchman,
there's a moment where, like, he calls his wife, right?
He calls his wife and he's like, hey, the guy pretending to be your husband isn't
your husband.
And she's like, you're weird.
I don't want to talk to you.
She hangs up.
And I'm like, why not open with personal information, right?
Your social security number is, right?
Like, if he starts off, like, hey, if I was just a stranger, I wouldn't know that you
like to get peed on, would I?
And then you'd have her fucking attention.
Yeah, exactly.
And maybe try one callback when there's a hang up.
Sure.
You know?
The other, that's even weirder with the other one, right?
Because they calls his boss to try to explain it to his boss.
But like John Travolta intercepts the call.
Like fate John Travolta intercepts the call.
And he's like, aha, I'm you now and you're me.
You know, we'll meet again in another action sequence.
You didn't tell any of your crime syndicate about this, did you?
No.
Cool.
Even now that you know I'm in town?
Okay, great.
Yeah. So, and by the way, he never tries to call the boss again, right?
He's like, oh, that didn't work. I guess I can't do that twice.
So, okay. So then Nick gets to the henchies place, to the other henchman's place where he goes, oh, you drug dealer, you, right?
Oh, yeah. So this is Dietrich, right? He's the bomb seller slash maybe drug dealer or whatever.
If you say so. If you're a serious international arms dealer, you're going to have.
What, like a very glitzy mansion, but probably build it inside of a warehouse to be.
Yeah, well, obviously.
So the first floor of your mansion is the apartment from friends.
The second floor, let me pitch you on this, open your hearts, is a ongoing party.
Perfect.
And can I say something?
Let me say something brave, because everyone wants to be so woke these days, but they're afraid to talk about real community building.
And Casper Troy has found fans.
family, okay?
Yep.
He knows his weird groupies who are hanging out there.
He's got drug dealers.
He's got third guy.
He knows everybody's niche.
Yes.
That's important.
There's a family here.
There's a community.
Absolutely.
As soon as he gets there,
they don't ask any questions.
They just bring him his box of chicklets and drugs and money and shit.
Oh, this is great.
Yeah, we see it again.
The, like, suitcase of badness.
This time he's got.
Boxo sin.
Yeah, he's got the two golden guns, obviously.
for dive with two guns thing.
He's got nine joints this time,
equally bad as last time,
just bags of paper with like pot inside.
I've been practicing.
They're still bad.
Yeah.
Not very hard, though.
There's what appears to be
10 capsules of echinacea,
which is a weird one.
A prescription from 1990
for some kind of drug
that says half a tablet
every morning.
Okay.
And of course,
chicklets.
There's chicklets.
And he does the drug,
he does the drug,
with his fellow bad guys.
It seems like you could just say,
I mean, look, again,
I don't know how this found family works,
but I feel like if you're the boss
of an international criminal empire,
you could just say,
no drugs for me tonight, thanks.
Yeah, I'm kind of doing a plan.
You don't have to training day yourself.
So, but he takes the drugs,
and, of course, he doesn't have the drug tolerance
that real Nick Cage has.
Yeah, it's really strong echinacea
or metamusea or whatever.
He took one whole,
tablet once a morning.
Yeah.
But then he's like, I want to go get
John Travolta.
And they're like, oh, what do you
want to do when you get
John Travolta
to one?
And he goes, I want to take his
face.
Face.
Oh.
Wait for it.
Off.
It's so good.
It's so good.
And he does the grab face motion.
Yep.
Like the fucking,
like the spy versus spy guy
picking his nose.
Yeah.
You might as well like unlock the three clasps on the briefs.
Exactly.
And show them.
There are times as a performer where you have to sort of know your limits,
where you have to understand where you'll be and what you're capable of.
I'll never convey to you unless you watch this movie how many times he and the henchman guy say face off.
I want to face off.
Face off.
Face off.
Face off.
This is, fate. Literally what I just said, face off.
Face off.
Face off.
Just watch it.
Just watch it.
No one involved in this movie is a bad person.
It's like an eight-minute Meisner exercise in the middle of this movie.
You have to watch it.
Pretty amazing.
So, yeah, so he goes to the bathroom.
The guy says, no more drugs for this man.
Oh, my God.
Quoted for decades.
Yep. Yep.
At every party for decades.
Drinking sink water like misery he.
And then this is where Geneagher Shone shows up
and smacks him into unconsciousness.
Because she's his ex-girlfriend
and she's mad at him or something.
We do get one more Nick Cage
looking at himself in the mirror.
It's like a golden retriever
getting ready for an audition
and like psyched himself off fighting him with himself.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, well, I think we can all agree
that that scene is most of the reason we're here.
So we've earned ourselves another break.
But first, let me give Act 3
the hard sell.
Will there be a pigeon-filled shootout
in a church? Will the pigeon-filled
shootout end in a boat chase?
Will the boat chase end in a
harpoon fight? Fuck the
fuck, yeah, they will. So stick around
for that singularly unimprovable
conclusion of
Face Off.
There he is
John Travolta.
Johnny T. Hey, big
movie guys. Thanks for
seeing me. Hey, thanks for coming
in. Yeah, we're so excited about
this movie. Yeah, it's me and
Nick Cage, right? That's right.
Have you read the script?
Sure. So, yeah, so like, you're going to be
like, you know, doing a Nick Cage
impersonation. Sounds
exciting. Yeah, but not just
that. Nick Cage is also going to
be doing a Nick Cage impersonation
because he's you pretending
to be him. Right.
Well, and then when he's not, he's going to be
an impersonation of me, right?
Oh.
I
Yeah
Because I'm inside him
Inside him
Sure, sure
Yeah
Just a heads up
We might have him
Just do Nick Cage
Sure
So wait
I'm gonna do
Nick Cage
Impersonation
And then
He's gonna do
Nick Cage
Doing a Nick Cage
Impersonation
Exactly
Yeah
It's gonna be so much fun
Well
Who's gonna
impersonate me
I don't know man
Someone
undressed as boredom for Halloween or something like that.
Dude. What? It's true.
It's got a point.
See?
And we're back for more of this shit.
We're going to rejoin the action with the script
desperately trying to explain why the fuck fake
John Travolta would continue
pretending to be John Travolta.
We've got him on the phone going, no, you don't understand
brother. So let me draw you a chart
with some yarn. Do you have any more pushpins
that are different colors? Because if they're all
blue, it won't work.
Brother, I'm going to use my position
as second in command of the FBI to get
rid of all of our terrorist for
higher rivals.
What do you mean? Am I actually going to do that at
any point in the movie? No, I'm going to be busy
with other
stuff. Also, what do we say before?
Boone nerd.
Also, how does that help if
I'm no longer a terrorist for
higher? You know, it doesn't
fucking matter. I know I look like
the second in command at the FBI, but I
I'm offering my services to you as a terrorist.
I act and live as...
It's just like everything you do is confusing motivation-wise.
Not gay.
So he's inside the house while this is happening.
But outside the house, his daughter pulls up with her date,
and her date tries to date rape her.
Yeah, there's this weird clip of Danny Masterson in real life doing a sex...
Yeah, that's right.
Yep.
Yep.
Great casting here as well.
but then fake John Travolta comes out and beats him up.
So that's nice.
Okay.
So this is an example of like John Wu being smarter than boo nerd, right?
So there has been an undercurrent.
We haven't mentioned it because it doesn't really amount to anything except in this scene,
which we're about to talk about.
There's been an undercurrent of like, is fake John Travolta going to rape real John Travolta's daughter?
Yeah.
Because she's a sexy teenage girl.
And what happens instead in the movie,
is he befriends her and in this case saves her from being assaulted and, like, gives her some
wisdom, which rules, right?
It doesn't make any fucking sense.
He's an international terrorist who's known for being really gross sexually.
The plot should be that he assaults this person, but he doesn't because the movie fucking
rules.
Yes, right?
Right.
But it doesn't make any sense.
And I'm sure someone was like, you know, John, it would actually make sense for castor or like,
And he's like, yeah, but that would be gross.
That would be a bummer.
That would be a fucking bummer.
Instead, he's going to give her a butterfly knife.
Exactly.
A fucking butterfly knife.
Oh.
What do you want to just make the movie based on terrible id stuff?
No, this is a serious film.
Yeah, but so she's pretty impressed with that Spencer's Gifts knife, though, that he gives her, though.
I wonder if it'll come up again later in the film.
So, okay.
Butterfly knives were so cool in the, well, I don't know.
They're still cool now.
Are they still cool?
I have one of my.
Das.
Do you actually?
No, it's not a knife.
It's just the one that you can do.
It's like a fake one that you can like swing around and it doesn't have a blade.
So, but then we cut back to fake Nick Cage getting woken up by his ex, Gina Gershahn, right?
And they have a moment where he's trying to not blow his cover but also not take advantage of her.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
And while that's going on, Pullux, the brother, is watching all this happen through binoculars.
reporting to fake John Travolta.
God, it's got to be so funny.
I hope everyone listening has watched this fucking movie.
It's got to be impossible to follow.
What the fuck I'm trying to say here?
But the point is, action scene, God damn it.
So, oh, sorry, we have to establish this.
So we introduced Gina Gershant's kid, who is also Nicholas Cage's kid.
He didn't know that until just now.
Or like, the real Nick Cage wouldn't have known that.
doesn't still know it.
Yeah.
And they show them like side by side for a second in like fuzziness to show that it's like,
oh, it looks like my dead kid.
It looks like this kid that we're seeing now did a face off with Archer's dad's son.
I was expecting a flashback to the shot kid in the hospital.
And they get little, the preschool calls Michael in.
And they're like, Michael, we need you to get the information from Gaston Troy.
There's going to be a bomb in 10 years.
Yeah, but he's like, well, you're pretty much the same making model a kid I had, and it freaks her out a little bit.
But then the FBI guys come in for an action sequence, damn it.
Let's get this going.
John Wu might as well step in front of the camera and be like, hey, sorry, kind of lost the plot here.
We're going to have someone jump through a window.
Yeah, it's going to be a dive, just a little dive roll real quick.
You know when you're like doing a bit and then the bits over, but you're still kind of there?
That's how I felt about the plot of this movie.
Anyways.
They're like crank in his hand.
Let's go.
Oh my God.
In his own movie.
We're doing a gun fight.
So yes, everybody starts repelling in through the windows.
It's like the rule is that everybody has to break new glass as they come into the building.
They might as well like replace the glass like an entire pane to smash through it again.
It's so good.
It's so glass everywhere.
Podcast listener, this isn't a.
11 minute shootout.
And it fucking rocks.
The guy walks in with a pane of glass.
The other guy holding the other side.
They can't do that.
It's the best.
All my goddamn notes have exclamation marks at this point, right?
Slide shooting, dive shooting, double guns, side leap shooting.
You know, that's all my notes at this point.
Yeah.
But all the unnamed characters die, right?
Yeah.
We get a lot of the dive rolls with the double guns.
It's pretty awesome.
We get a highlight.
for me was one SWAT team guy
gets shot by a bad guy with like a shotgun
and the SWAT team guy
while dying does a
1080 in pike
position off the balcony.
Sure does. Yeah.
Well, and then of course, fake Nick Cage, he's
a real FBI agent so he doesn't want to kill
any of these FBI agents so we watch him
shoot them in the knees
and shit like that mercifully.
Because he's a good guy.
Because he's a good guy. Yeah, you can tell by
the dive rolls. Yeah.
Okay. Just basically.
on watching 90s movies.
I know it's not exactly real,
but I feel like it's pretty close.
SWAT teams should be training
for pretty much nothing
but dive roll shooting from bad guys, right?
Oh, absolutely.
The number one thing that they train for.
You just wait for them to finish the dive roll
and you shoot them.
So then, okay, so, but a lot of people die
and, you know, the good guys are the named characters.
I don't even know who I call the good guys at this point,
but the named characters run off.
And now, like, Travolta and Cage are stalking each other.
This is the moment where they're like on either side of a double-sided mirror from each other,
which why would you have a thing that has a mirror on both sides of it?
When would that ever be useful to you as a thing to have?
But.
Okay, well, in fairness, John Wu, for sure in real life lives in a house with nothing but
mirrors like that that face both directions and big guns and doves.
And pigeons.
Yes, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, and he points guns of them.
Well, it does make for a goddamn perfect fucking scene
That goddamn scene where they're both standing there
Looking at the mirror of each other
And pointing the guns at each other
And this is the thing, right?
Everybody's like, oh, it means you're so much better than this subtle filmmaking
In this substance.
Boone nerd.
Fuck subtle filmmaking.
John Wu was like, because that's who's in the mirror
Is the guy.
It's them.
Do you get it?
No, don't worry.
Knock knock.
Who's that at your door?
It's me, John Wu.
Pretty fucking cool thing I do.
did, right? Do you get it?
Do you not get it? Don't worry. There will be another
explosion in one seconds.
Just in a full Nelson
while John Wu explains the movie
to me? Yeah.
Hey, John Wu, I'm always going to like that tongue-sucking
scene, right? And he's like, you sure are, man. Don't worry
about it. Yeah, so never going to feel problematic at all.
So yeah, but then, so
at this point, fake Nick Cage
runs off and the FBI
agent who has the explosion gun
uses it to explode the stairwell between fake Nick Cage and fake John Travolta.
It's a terrible use of explosion gun.
Hey, Craig, I can't help.
But as you're suiting up for our little rain here, you have a rocket-powered grenade.
Yeah, mine's much better.
I have a much better gun than you guys.
It's much better.
Better.
It feels like a relative term.
It's so much better than yours.
It's bigger.
It blows up everything.
Bigger and more powerful for sure.
Are you expecting to find a tank on this?
I'm shooting the stairs.
So, okay.
So Nick Cage gets to the roof.
I don't know idea why.
But when he gets there, he finds Pollux Troy there, right?
So this is fake Nick Cage, of course.
So he kicks Pollux through a series of skylights to death.
Like American Gladdy, like the rope swing and he just drop kicks him.
Yeah, totally.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And then he falls dead right in front of fake John Travolta, right?
He's fake John Travolta's brother.
a very emotional moment.
And you can see here
right, because Nick Cage got
to have the scene with the sun, right?
And John Travolta was like, yeah, good job, Nick.
All right, now it's time for me to watch my brother die.
Acting, acting,
hey, John, you're saying the word acting.
Lips moving.
No, no.
No, I didn't, you didn't hear that.
This movie has confused you so much
that you forgot that it was the same guy
in both of them.
But yeah, so and then there's this moment where the cop is like,
why are you so emotional, boss?
It's just Pollux Troy.
So fake John Travolta shoots him in the head.
Yeah.
I wanted people to keep entering and celebrating.
We got Pollock.
Giant pile of bodies near the door.
So, okay.
So then we cut to fake Nick Cage sneaking into his own house.
And in case we don't know what it is that he's sneaking into,
when he gets in, he goes, home.
Home.
is where I am now.
The fucking full Nelson
Titan as John Wu leans down
and whispers in my ear, he's in his house now.
This is his home.
This is the house where he lives.
So he's in the house looking through his shit
when Eve, his wife, steps out of the shower.
And he goes, don't scream.
And she's like, I will comply with that.
Now, there's a cop downstairs,
like watching her, like keeping her secure.
He was established in a scene that must have got caught
from the final film, I'm assuming.
But he has to be selectively quiet
so as not to alert that cop, right?
So he's like, don't scream.
She's like, sure, why not?
And then he catches her up on the plot.
And she's like, wow, this is a stupid fucking premise.
I mean, see, even no matter how well made the movie is,
or probably going to talk about it,
and I got off of movies eventually.
It's just such a dumb idea.
No, John Boo's got me in a headlock.
No, John Wu says it's great.
John Wu says it's great.
So, yeah.
Oh, and he looks at the picture of his dead.
son and he does the face swipe thing
and she's like, hold on a second.
How would he know about the face swipe
thing if he wasn't really my husband
wearing Nicholas Cage's face?
Okay, he does two things
in this scene that I have pretty serious issues.
But the first is when he sees the picture,
he does a face swipe, she's like, oh, maybe it's him.
And then he breaks the picture frame
so that he can take the thing.
That's his. That's your house.
Just undo the little lashes.
Do you want to save this frame
to me put something else.
It's nice, it's brushed nickel.
I broke the glass, though.
The other thing is, he's like,
she doesn't know what to believe
at the end of the scene,
and he goes in to kiss her,
and if I'm wearing the face
of the man who's killed my child,
I'm just going to go ahead and wait for smoothies
until I get.
Right?
Assuming she believes me,
I'm still going to wait.
And also,
then, of course,
we've got the big reveal it,
right?
He goes, hey,
but you can tell,
you can find out for sure
because my blood type is O and Castor's blood type is,
or it's O negative rather,
and Castro's blood type is A, B.
And I'm like, do you,
but do you guys know your wife's blood type?
I don't know my blood type.
I know, that's what I was saying.
Like, how would you, but, but.
I probably should know my blood type and Ann's blood type.
Lucinda's is candy corn in case you want to bring out.
Oh, okay.
All right.
How dare you.
She's only got one drop in there, though.
So you got to be, okay.
Dutiful.
So I'll just, I understand Booneerd, but here's the thing.
If Archer, if Sean Archer is O negative, he couldn't receive any A.B. blood from Castor's face
when you do the face thing.
It just doesn't add up.
There's no blood in your face.
It's just the one thing.
So it would be amazing if it, like halfway through the movie his face started being rejected, you know, or something.
Yes, it just swells up.
Yeah.
So, okay.
So that evening, fake Travolta gets home right now.
and now like the wife suspects him,
but she has to act like she doesn't suspect him.
Okay, she thinks there might be a face-off scenario.
And she just stayed there?
Like she wouldn't just like leave and go to the cops.
I don't know.
Anything?
You would think something.
Yeah.
She'll spend the rest of the movie being as suspicious as possible.
Well, and keep in mind that like fake John Travolta is aware that fake Nick Cage
escaped from prison and is back in town.
Like, so he would stand a reason that he would tell his wife, right?
like so you would like he would he would he would have to operate under the assumption that she knows but he doesn't for whatever reason
so he comes he he he feels like he can still save it he comes home and he's like hey honey i know i've been acting like
some weird guy in a me suit recently and i just want to apologize if i've been weird and you out
it's because my boss died i killed him in an earlier scene yeah we didn't talk about it because there's just so many scenes
that don't matter the boys skipped over it because it's it's literally too silly to bother with
and never matters to the movie.
John Wu yelled at us to fucking go.
At one point he goes,
you're the only family I've got.
I'm like, dude, you have a daughter.
How could that be?
Only family I don't want to fuck.
So, okay, but that night,
she takes a bit of his blood while he sleeps, right?
So she can go and check and see if it's O negative or A, B.
Now, while all you naysayers out there say that this is an unrealistic part of
the movie. I want to be very clear. I have 100% confidence I could take as much blood from
pancakes Heath while he sleeps as I want. Regular Heath. Dude, you could do this to Heath on a
airplane. You could do a face off to me while I was sleeping. Yeah, I could do a face off. Yeah, if I got him
on a plane that's got that right vibration. Within five minutes, you could be doing a face off.
I'm face off. And the never is John Wu standing right off screen rolling his fingers
like get on with it more apparent
than it is in this scene, right?
Because she goes to the hospital that night
to check the blood.
And when she checks it and she finds out
that it's the right kind,
it's the wrong kind of blood,
it turns out that Nick Cage
was hiding in the hospital's
blood checking room the whole time.
Because fuck here.
You're Nicholas Cage,
the actor coming into our hospital
and sneaking into the blood room?
No.
Okay.
I'm a nurse.
Do you want like a protein bar?
Are you going to wait there for a while?
Yeah.
Okay.
Do you have a fair life instead of a muscle milk?
They taste forever.
I have an IQ bar.
Oh, those are the worst.
Take your face off.
Thomas Keller makes one now.
Oh.
But now she knows who he is, right?
And there's this moment, or she doesn't, she's not quite sure.
So he has to tell her the story of their first date.
And it is the most stupidly convoluted too many things in it story.
So she puts the bread on this weighted,
which then starts a boulder rolling.
He's got this fucking Roob Goldberg explanation of the story
where she broke her tooth on the bread
and the dentist was drunk and she kissed him despite
it's, yeah, it's just nonsense, fucking nonsense.
Truly, like if you made me drunk,
improvise a backstory about something.
And this is, then this is dentists,
he's drunk.
The dentist
He's drunk.
It's how he is how we met.
It's like you have friends who met on Tinder who say,
who have a lie about how they met because they're embarrassed about meeting on Tinder.
That's this lie.
It's like, well, her friend Stephanie, who died.
We were all carrying a bunch of parcels.
Yeah.
So and also there's like I have to put this out.
She goes, she goes, well, you know, me and him have been living together as man and wife
for several days.
And I'm like, yeah, okay, so,
so did the doctor give you Nick Cage's dick to,
like, I mean, like, would you not notice
that it was a different penis?
Eli could do a dick off on me so easily on an airplane.
Oh, I would do it.
See, this is the thing.
My wife is the only one who's safe from a dick off.
The minute she can see that from a distance,
she's like, you're Nick Cave.
Fuck out of here with your dick visible to the naked eye.
Heath.
I'm growing or not a shower.
Sorry.
Take off my husband's face.
I'll tell Ann.
I'm going.
I'm going.
So, okay.
Please don't tell Ann I did a dick off.
Anne's waiting outside.
But she's at the hospital,
commiserating with him,
but just then Trvolta wakes up, right?
And realizes that she's missing.
So he's got to go to the hospital to check on her
in order to add some suspense to this very long,
boring conversation that they're having.
And this is when she tells him,
she's like, hey, you know, you can win the most.
movie at the boss's funeral tomorrow.
That could be where the big final action sequence happens.
And he's like, well, are there doves there?
She's like, yeah, there's dubs there.
He's like, well, fuck, yeah, then.
Right.
Oh, and this is when he storms into the hospital.
Yeah, Trolteface does.
Yeah.
He storms in and he's very suspicious that Eve is on to the thing.
And she's a doctor.
She's got somebody on a bed there.
And he like pulls a sheet off the face of the person on the bed
because he thought it was going to be.
For sure, Caged Face.
But it's just some guy, like a burn victim that she was working on as a doctor.
So what's implied there is she set up a guy with bloody face bandages as a decoy.
Or she just like loo loo to do.
To buy like 10 seconds.
Happened to duck into a room with a face themed injury.
Just to prank him?
Right.
She's just like pretending to do doctor work on that guy.
Yeah.
It's baffling.
I wanted burn victim guy to be like when they're talking.
like, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to,
I want a burn victim guy to be like,
can I get my bandage back?
I feel like that was necessary.
Right.
This accident I was in undid one of the ties
and you can see it's pretty bad.
Hey, shush, shh, shh, shh, this is part of a prank I'm doing.
Now, Heath, speaking of just going in and interrupting your important partner's work,
I feel like you do this with lawyer stuff on a regular,
do you walk in and just like sweep all of her legal work on the desk and be like,
it's a spreadsheet.
So okay
So now we get to like everybody getting ready for the finale scene
They explain why the the daughter will be away
Until she needs to be kidnapped later
Right
And then we cut to the funeral
And we get a bunch of like long slow motion walking
With birds in the background
Like at this point like fucking John Wu
Just might as well put a CV on screen
Oh yeah
Hey you guys excited for the film
now you're the movie, don't worry about it.
You're just going to shoot some guns.
I feel like John Wu had to make a compromise
here. Somebody was like, hey man, doves
don't really make sense here. We're going to do seagulls.
And he was like, fucking fine. It's a lot of
seagulls, though. It's got to be a lot.
So many secrets. Well, yeah, then there's seagulls
for one scene and then it gets inside the church. And he's like,
there's fucking pigeons in the church.
He snucked some dogs. Yes, he snuckets some fucking dove.
Do you have a jacket full of doves right now?
John.
No?
Uh-uh. John.
There's shit coming out of the bottom of the
jacket, I'm hungry and I'm
shitting myself. If anybody's
keeping track at home, that's yet
another time Eli's pigeon impersonation
came in handy. You thought
he wasted that NYU money.
Go violets. All right. That's right.
Elite
number one dream school in America.
Oh, yeah. So fake
Nick Cage, prays for his kid
or something during the funeral,
and he sends an altar boy
up to fake John Travolta
with a picture of Murder Boy from
the beginning. Hey,
it's me.
Yeah. I'm the most
well-known terrorist in the
world. Will you go into that
funeral and give this
guy a picture of a child?
You want me to give that? Right in the front row.
To the cop? Yeah. Just while the funerals have. Just handed to him right now.
In the middle of the theater, it's like, yeah, let's see if he
crumbles it up. Give him one of these. Wink.
When I walk in, do I stop the person doing the eulogy for a second?
Please, if you would. Okay. Here, take
This Vavasula.
What?
So, okay.
The funeral is over, though.
Now it's time for a church showdown, right?
So fake Nick Cage is in there.
And then fake John Travolta comes in doing pseudo-Latin.
And it's time for a little gun food.
God.
Okay.
And we get another standoff.
Mm-hmm.
They kidnap Eve.
Yeah.
So, okay, to gunfight in real life?
I have no idea.
how gun fights work.
You're talking to the experts.
You guys know about this.
In gun fights, do you ever actually land on a standoff
where you're just like both with guns,
bullets in the chamber, and you're pointing them at each other
but not shooting?
No, you would just shoot then.
You feel like you just shoot.
I feel like what you need to do is you need to trick the other person
into thinking that's how gun fights work.
Is you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, are we about to do one of those things
where we both stand there?
Because if I shot you would shoot, right?
Are you trying to inception me?
The other person's like, yeah, oh my God.
And then you just shoot and you're like, see, that's how fast they are.
Yeah.
Actually, the whole point of a gun.
Yeah, the whole thing.
That's the whole reason we have them.
Yeah.
So, and then, okay, so then, but now we have the fucking, the super standoff, right?
Because they're having a standoff.
But then Gina Gershun comes in on his side and some henchmen come in on her side.
And we have like nine standoffs in a row.
Truly, they do the standoff and they've done it so much.
And then Gina Gershant shows up and she's like,
triple standoff.
I started laughing.
It was so good.
And I was like,
please keep adding to this
for no reason.
And I forgot that they had done
a dove.
If a dove had stepped from behind
one of the pews.
It would have made more sense.
And had the daughter.
I couldn't stop laughing.
And so she does that.
It's a triple standoff.
And then a henchman is like,
quad.
No, it's quad.
Let's make a square.
Everybody make a square now.
We were in triangle.
Now we do square.
Cinco.
Wait, hold on.
Hold on.
This is going to be complicated.
Just bear with.
me. I have two guns.
I also have an extra one. I'm giving it
to Cage Face. He has two now.
Where are we at on the shape?
I think one of us has to shoot an ally.
And I think we're all on the same gap.
I think otherwise
this is just one side
having another side at gunpoint.
Oh, damn.
So, okay, so then they all shoot
each other. All of the unnamed characters
died. They learned that Mexican standoffs
aren't real and just start shooting.
Yeah, right, right. Well, sorry,
all the unnamed characters, but also
Gina Gershaw, she dies
protecting Nick Cage, right?
And as she dies, her dying words
or you can have my kid.
You can have my kid. Even if you're actually
Sean, aren't you wearing Nick Cage?
I would be totally cool with that too.
Yeah. So, and then, so after
all of this shooting, we get the daughter
showing up. She's just walking and going
like, mom, dad, is all that gunfire
coming from in here? I missed the
fucking shootout. God.
She rolled up out
heard a giant gun fight
and was just like walking
curiously toward it. I'm needed.
And here she is. Yeah. Okay.
Also, by the way, just very
important because John Wu would be mad if we don't mention it.
There was a cross-armed double gun moment.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Which is the same as just regular arms.
No, it's your arms start on either side of you.
It's fucking cooler. No, you're more compact.
You don't have to like, you're more compact.
And you have more motion.
You have an easier access to behind.
you motion. You're further away from the target
with both. Oh, but the behind the back thingy
and the, if you want to do behind the back, you can get behind the little easier.
And can you walk, hey, can you run through a doorway
doing it with your arms out? No. Yeah, this is why I lose so many gun fights.
Why you lose so many gun fights? We always say this to you.
Mexican standoffs or anything. I do the standoff. It's just, I thought it was
ethical. People at the New Orleans live show know how many gun fights
he loses. Oh, Jesus Christ. I do the standoff. Eli
slaps me.
in the deck and then shoot him.
So, okay. So now,
they're all running off to have more action scenes.
The wife calls Margaret Cho to tell her the whole plot, right?
So now we have a moment where, like, Nick Cage gets the drop on,
John gets the drop on Nick Cage, and then the daughter shows up but doesn't know which
him to save, right?
We have the Spider-Man meme moment.
Well, she very reasonably shoots the one that's not wearing her dad's face.
The known terrorist.
Yeah.
She hasn't seen face off.
Well, she's the only character who hasn't figured it out.
But yeah.
And then once it would be just to his perfect advantage to play along with that, right?
After she shoots Nick Cage, fake Nick Cage in the shoulder, he grabs her points a gun at her and licks her face.
And he goes, no, I'm the bad guy.
I'm wearing your dad's face.
I'm the bad guy.
I felt like we had a connection earlier in the movie.
It's weird that I've made this turn on you as well.
Especially knowing that you've got the butterfly knife.
gave me the butterfly knife, but like now you've licked my face.
So she stabs him with the butterfly knife.
That was good.
Yeah.
That's called a callback in 90s movies.
That's all it took.
When the ball that you rolled down the top of the hill reaches the bottom.
That's all it took.
The entire decade was one big Chekhov's butterfly knife.
Yeah, it was.
So Travolta runs off now, fake Travolta, he runs off and he steals a speedboat
because that's the only vehicle we haven't used yet other than tandem bike and rickshaw.
God, this is so good.
It's just so good.
I feel like I'm failing you,
but just watch the movie.
It's awesome.
It really is, yeah.
Oh, fight.
So now they're like chasing each other on speedboats, right?
Because fake Nick Cage also knows how to drive a speedboat.
Yeah.
So they have the speedboat chase.
Travolta face gets ahead by a little bit because,
just by chance, this was useful,
a large pile of different types of explosive containers just sitting out on its dock.
Like you do.
So he shoots those.
They blow up and then Cageface finally does get a boat for the chase.
Yeah.
Yes, right.
And luckily, he gets a triple mushroom and is able to catch up pretty quickly.
Yeah, that was helpful.
That was helpful.
He catches up and he goes for a pit maneuver with boats, which was interesting.
The thing you do with like a car chase, cops like, you know, ramming back tire from the side.
Yeah, it doesn't work great.
There's also, there's a great moment where like he jumps out, like all the cops are just like, you know,
hey, we're going to shoot you if you don't stop this boat chase,
but then fake Josh Revolta shoots all of them instead
and then jumps their boat with his boat.
It's just, I cannot do it justice.
Somebody runs through the middle of this little river area
with like an apple cart that's also a jet ski ramp.
Yep, yep.
And he just flies through a boat.
Pain a glass between them, yeah.
After having my apple cart knocked over by so many chase scenes,
I'm so glad to finally see.
there my apples on the sea.
Oh, no.
John Travolta way.
But there's a boat explosion, right?
Fake Nick Cage has to get out of his boat
into the other boat, right?
So now they're fighting on the boat.
The boat is out of control.
God, I can't not make this sound amazing.
There's also some great fucking stunt work here, right?
Where the Nick Cage character gets knocked out of the boat
and has to do like the skiless water skiing alongside it and shit.
That was awesome.
It was fucking amazing.
And then I just wrote in my notes,
there's too many moving parts for me to explain
all the bullshit that just happened,
but there's a boat explosion that ends with them fighting
against a different backdrop now.
Yes.
And, you know, appropriate improvised weapons along the way.
Yes.
So they're like on the boat for a little bit more
and it's an anchor fight,
like swinging an anchor with the train for a second.
But then it's like, wait, wait, wait.
We're doing a harpoon gun fight.
They didn't really come up with anything for it, though.
I think, like, John Wu's like, we're going to double harpoon cross hands.
Not really.
There's not much to do with a harpoon.
We'll circle back.
We'll circle back.
We'll crash the boat.
We'll circle back.
Yeah.
So, but yeah, so they crashed the boat.
They have a fight on the beach with different improvised weapons.
Well, not all different because they eventually go back to the harpoon gun.
They do.
There's a, there's a fishing rod off to the side.
And I was like, please, one of you pick up the fishing rod and hook the other guy.
He didn't have that many guts.
Let's talk about the death of Caster Troy, though.
By all means.
So they're fighty fight, fight, fight, fight.
And then he goes to shoot him with the harpoon.
He stabs him with the harpoon gun.
He goes to shoot him with the harpoon gun.
Caster Troy, fake John Travolta face, Caster Troy, yeah.
Cidrevolta face Caster Troy, catches the harpoon
before it can shoot out of the gun.
I think it was similar to that, but I think what he did,
I might have this wrong.
I think he grabbed the like, you know, rubber band packing cords that kind of propel the harpooning and just like holds them tight.
He holds them there just long enough so he can do a dramatic monologue and don't worry because this won't matter.
Cut his face up a little bit.
Yes.
Like for spite, I guess.
Yeah.
And then he lets go.
Well, no, no.
Then fake Nick Cage kicks him in the nuts.
Yes.
I feel like you do that before he starts.
It's getting, it's cutting up his face.
Yeah, right.
I could have used a harpoon standoff.
If there was a second harpoon gun.
Oh, that would have been cool.
A harpoon off.
Yeah.
So, but,
but ultimately he does manage to kill fake John Travolta.
They put both of them into the same ambulance, which seems weird.
Yeah.
But the reason they do that is so that Nick Cage can reach over and steal back his
wedding ring, which is, you know, great symbolic moment except for like the EMT is pretty
sure you just robbed that dead guy.
He is, he hasn't been watching the movie to this one.
Oh, sorry, there was a face-off scenario.
Have you seen that?
It's a face.
It's my wedding ring.
Yeah.
So, okay.
So then they, all of the cops know it's real him now that Margaret Cho has filled them in and all, I guess.
So they brought in all the best face surgeons in the world to give him back his old face.
And love handles, I guess.
Yeah, do you think they put him back?
I really wanted there to be a line where they were like, and we're going to put back all your fat,
all the fat on your tummy that you had.
The big fat fat on your toe.
Okay, enough.
I got it.
I'm also going to uncut your hair again.
You hear someone crying from upstream.
Make him stop, Nick.
You got to make him stop.
So there's also this moment.
It's so fucking dumb, right?
So because he goes into the surgery.
He's like, I don't need the bullet wound anymore because I'm over my dead kid now.
And then we get him coming home from the hospital.
Eve looks up and sees him coming down the step
and I'm like, she didn't pick him up from the fucking hospital.
He just had to drive himself home in his post-operative stand.
How did his car get there?
They would have to coordinate that.
He had an Uber.
I'm defrosting something and then I want to do a little prep.
I have a Zoom call at one and they say you'll be done at two
and I just don't know that the Zoom call will be over.
So he comes in and they have a big hug and his daughter dresses conservatively.
No more black makeup for her.
Yes.
That's resolved.
And then he's like, oh, hey, also, I brought a son, can we keep him?
We have all written, can we keep him in our notes?
He actually, he says it like, and I'll walk him and I'll clean up his shit.
So to be clear, he left the hospital after having his face on surgery.
He picked up a child.
Yep, sure.
He showed up in an Uber to get a child.
grabbed the child, put him in an Uber.
The Uber driver was like, this is cool.
And then he came home.
And he was like, can we keep him?
And then he's like, hey, kid, stay outside for just a second.
I'm going to do a thing.
I'm going to do a dramatic introduction.
Here's the thing.
These two ladies might say no, in which case we're turning right back around to the orphanage.
So really cute it up, right?
Big eyes.
Big eyes.
Trembling lips.
So.
They lock it in.
All right.
And credits perfection.
It can't.
be improved. All right. So that's going to do it for our break, I guess, our review of a face-off,
but that's not going to do it for the episode just yet because we still need to get back to doing
the awful ones. So Eli, tell us what's on deck. A serious accident, a mysterious black cube.
A long-lost love. A famous author has become an expert in hacking into major government secrets.
What? In an international press conference, he says he will disclose the secrets to all while
dealing with a toxic love triangle.
Too much. Threats to his life and the mysterious and dangerous and dangerous events
that have been happening due to his possession of the magical black cube.
I'm so excited.
We'll be continuing our January secular tacular with Neil Breins.
Oh, okay.
Fateful findings.
Now I get it.
All right.
Neil Brean has me in a headlock right now.
Genuinely look forward to.
We're going to bring episode 539 to a merciful close.
Once I get a huge thanks to all the Patreon donors.
that help make the show go.
If you'd like to get yourself among their ranks,
you can make a per episode,
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If you enjoyed this show, be sure to check out our TV shows the skating,
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If you have questions, comments or cinematic suggestions,
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Our theme song was written and performed by Ryan's Laugh of Dress on Mars.
All the other music was written and performed by our audio engineer,
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Thanks again for giving us a chunk of your life this week.
For Heath, Enright, Needla, Bossy,
I'm the delusions, promise to work harder,
earn another check next week.
Until then, we'll leave you with the American graffiti clothes.
Nicholas Cage went on to star as John Madden
in David O. Russell's upcoming by a pick, Madden.
Probably coming to a secular tag owner near you.
Noah would go on to also buy the 10th anniversary collector edition on DVD.
John Travolta would go on to let his kid take more bullets for him.
Have you ever heard John Wu talk about this movie?
No.
He talks about this movie the way we talk about this movie.
I think he believes it's his best movie.
He is.
He is his best movie.
He might be right.
But he's also, everyone's like, well, don't you think it's a little absurd?
And he's like, yeah.
Do you see the doves fly through the air?
Hey, do you know what movies are?
Did you see the fucking boat explosion?
Do you see the bow fight?
The killer, we were.
was pretty sweet. God,
Killers great.
I'm going to shoot this guy.
A lot of his Chinese stuff is good.
Behind my back.
Yeah.
All right.
Interstitial 1.
Multiple boat fights.
It's just the one boat fight.
I feel like the boat fight has different faith.
No, you're right.
You're right.
It's a symphony.
It's a symphony in movements.
It's two different.
There's two different boats fighting.
There's boat fight, like two different boats fighting.
And then there's like boat fight.
They're both on the same.
Fight on boat.
Yes.
It's like the 1812 overture.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Except not boring.
Changes keys.
French national...
Similar number of explosions, though.
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