It was announced last week that 24 years after the hit action movie Face Off hit cinema screens that a sequel is in the works.
When this news first broke on Deadline last Thursday, it was at first reported that it would be a remake of the original which starred Nicholas Cage and John Travolta. Since then Director Adam Wingard who will create this new film has clarified that it will be a sequel and not a remake.
With a very quick spoiler warning for those of you who are reading this article about the sequel to the 24 year old film that you’ve never seen…yeah there will be spoilers.
As anyone who did see the first film will know, it ended fairly conclusively, and it’ll be difficult to imagine how a direct sequel could actually unfold.
If a sequel had come out within a couple of years or even five years they could potentially make the case that the villain of the movie Castor Troy who was played by Nick Cage, could have not really died. It would be a stretch, but in theory they could say that just as he was in a coma and being kept alive by machines at the start of the first film, that he once again is just in a coma. They could explain how he has an incredible threshold for pain and say that due to drugs has a brain that slips into comas in some kind of defensive action…who knows, but you could certainly imagine this would have been the plot of a straight to VHS sequel in 1999.
But could this still be the plot of a sequel in 2022? Could the plot be that Nick Cage has been in a 25 year coma and now he’s woken up and is after revenge? Possibly, but whilst this story would be a sequel, it wouldn’t really give a good reason to revisit the main gimmick of the original film. How would they possibly say that Castor Troy is back and he wants to once again swap faces with John Travolta’s character Sean Archer. What would the logic be?
Perhaps the story will be set within the same world as the original but focus on other characters instead. Maybe Nick Cage simply won’t appear, and John Travolta will be in the senior FBI agent role who sends another younger agent into an undercover mission wearing another person’s face as he had done a quarter of a century earlier.
This feels a much more likely approach to take with the sequel, although its hard to see how this will feel like a real sequel to the original. Other then a retread of the original would this leave any potential story for Sean Archer, his wife or daughter Jamie? It’s hard to see how there would be any plot for them other then this being another adventure for the Archer family taking on new challenges without much connection to the face swapping gimmick.
One option that feels less exciting, but relatively possible is that the new film will go all out on new tech and that maybe there is a new terrorist who is using some ground breaking nano tech to change his face to disguise himself as others and perhaps in copycat fashion is committing crimes whilst looking like a digitally de-aged Nick Cage who is haunting the close to retirement John Travolta.
The last possibility we’ll cover today could be the most likely and go the route of most Disney cartoon sequels and simply focus on the children of the previous film’s main characters. In the first film Sean’s son Michael was accidentally killed by Castor Troy in a failed attempt to kill Archer himself. It’s very unlikely, but not impossible that they could say he was still alive some how and be the villain of this film, who seeks to swap places with the son of Castor Troy, who by the end of the first film was now seemingly adopted by the Archer family after.
This possibility would create an interesting role reversal where the true Archer is the bad guy and the true Troy is the goodie. It would also allow Sean to struggle with his loyalty of who does he side with? The son who he thought had died in 1991 and hasn’t seen since, or the child he has raised since 1997 and adopted as a son for 25 years? If they went with this plot it would be hard to include Nick Cage in it unless it was like the Green Goblin appearing to his son in Spider-man 2 and 3.
Whatever the plot is, it will be some time before we find out what approach is taken as the film has only just been announced and we have no idea of when the release will be.
What do you think Face Off 2 will be about? Put your thoughts in the comments section to discuss.
