We all know who Nic Cage is. He’s a dangerously unhinged actor who had a pyramid constructed to house his remains. When you see him screaming, “Not the bees! Not the bees!”; it’s easy to forget that this guy won an Oscar. He is a genuinely good actor, but he owes a lot of money to the IRS, and will take any job he can get.

Nicolas Cage is weird. He named his son Kal-El. He’s plenty weird onscreen too, delivering some of the most bipolar performances in movie history. You can see the same histrionics in the role that won him an Oscar on display when he dresses as a bear and cold-cocks a woman.

In Face/Off, one of his bigger roles, Cage plays a terrorist who switches faces with the FBI agent vowing to bring him to justice. He costars with John Travolta, who plays the FBI agent who switch faces with the terrorist he vows to bring to justice. And then the doves come out.

Face/Off starts out with a little boy, no older than five, getting shot in the head. It’s a John Woo movie, so no punches are going to be pulled. The next scene ends with a plane crash and gun ballet and someone getting flattened in a wind tunnel. This is the first eighteen minutes of this film.

John Woo had a long career in Hong Kong before coming to the US. The first time I saw Hard Boiled, I couldn’t get clips from it out of my head. The grace of the dives, the flash and crack of the guns. A baby urinating on the hero to put out a fire. Hard Boiled was a bloodbath, but sentimental, like all John Woo movies.

I haven’t seen all of his movies, but I have to say that Face/Off is in his top three (that I know about). With a Hollywood budget and stars, he shot a bloody gunfight around a five-year-old boy listening to “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” He ends the movie with a brutal gunfight in a church, followed by a high-speed boat chase that ends when their stunt men are thrown onto the beach. This was a bay seemingly made of napalm because everything blew up.

Face/Off seemed like the last few episodes of a long-running show. Agent Sean Archer and Castor Troy have a long history of failing to kill each other, and it shows. There are so many stories between them, I’m surprised a comic book company never got the licensing rights to do prequels. There are so many characters who have names and are given a personality who are in maybe two scenes, from Archer’s best friend, Tito to the agents at the FBI office, to Castor’s brother Pollax, to the vaguely incestuous Demetri and Sasha, who work with Troy.

Even though Nicolas Cage danced, grinned, and got a little pedo as Castor Troy, the movie is never more entertaining as when he’s John Travolta. When Travolta is Sean Archer, he has all the charisma of a sack of mashed potatoes in a toupee, but if there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s mischief. He plays Castor Troy like a sociopathic thirteen-year-old boy.

With John Travolta as the bad guy, Nicolas Cage gets to be the good guy. Where Travolta’s performance ranges from annoyed to angry, Cage brings in some real pathos. This war is weighing on both of them, and it shows.

John Woo’s career didn’t get any better than this. He made some more movies in America, to diminishing returns, including Mission Impossible 2, as well as Windtalkers, the movie about a Navajo Code Talker where the main character is a white guy. Eventually he went back to Hong Kong and has been making the kinds of movies he wants to make.

This was my favorite movie until it got dethroned two years later. I bonded to the moral grayness—when Travolta is Troy, he becomes a father and a husband, and when Cage is Archer, he steals and lies and commits great acts of violence. I was pretty convinced I was a bad guy back then, and it was good to see that you could be bad and do good things.

I also really dug the gun ballet, as well as the mythos, and the finest, as Jason Mantzoukas calls it, “kabuki acting.” I could talk about this movie forever, like how the Troy brothers are named after the Gemini brothers, but I won’t. I’m not qualified to say if this is his magnum opus. What I will say is that this movie was the work of a mad genius, and I salute you. If there’s one word you can use to describe John Woo, it’s sincerity. I think this is how he sees the world. I think that, most of all, is what I connected with.