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Castor Troy: It's like looking in a mirror. Only... not.

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When Sean sees himself for the first time as Castor Troy, he takes the coat rack and slams it into the tri-fold mirror. The right side mirror is knocked back, and both the cameraman and camera are briefly visible in the reflection. See more...

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The prison that Pollux is in is called Erehwon which is "no where" backwards. See more...

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Face/Off (1997) - 27 corrections

Directed by John Woo, starring Alessandro Nivola, Gina Gershon, Joan Allen, John Travolta, Nicolas Cage (add more)

Genres: Action, Crime, Drama, Sci-fi, Thriller

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

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Castor Troy has the surgeon and other two witnesses killed in a fire to prevent anyone from knowing the identity between him and Archer had been switched. However, when the surgeon performed the operation, he had several assistants helping him, none of whom were killed in the fire. Which means other people knew about this. [Just because we don't see them killed on screen, doesn't mean they weren't killed. Troy could easily have murdered them at their homes or killed them in another room at the medical center.]
Edit Corrected by LorgSkyegon
When Archer arrives at the prison and gloats over Troy, he holds up his hand with the wedding ring on it. The hand we see in closeup is much hairier than John Travolta's hand. [That hand is not "much hairier" than Travolta's. John has an ample amount of dark hair on his hands and fingers and the close-up is consistent with that.]
Edit Corrected by lmao
At the beginning of the movie when Archer is with his son, the merry-go-round is going one way, then, in another shot it is going the opposite direction. [The carousel turns in the same direction in every single shot.]
Edit Corrected by lmao
When Archer (Castor Troy at the time) takes the cigarettes from the daughter's room, and goes to light one up, when he opens the pack, the end of the smokes is orange, yet after Archer takes a puff, the entire cigarette is white with no orange end. [When he takes the cigarette from Jamie's pack it is entirely white and stays that way.]
Edit Corrected by lmao
When Dubov is in prison and is about to be electrocuted, his boots are taken off and he is left with inner boots. After the shooting and killing, he scrambles on the floor and is barefoot when he throws the cot against the security guards, then he climbs up the stairs and has the inner boots on again. [First, Dubov is not about to be "electrocuted", he is in the prison clinic to receive electric shock treatment for misbehavior and second, he is actually barefoot when the scene opens. Third, it is Sean (as Castor Troy) whose magnetic boots are taken off, when he is dragged into the clinic and he is left with regular boots. Fourth, during the rest of this scene, Dubov remains barefoot and Sean (as Castor) wears the boots.]
Edit Corrected by lmao
When Archer is loaded into the ambulance beside Pollux's body near the end of the film, he removes his wedding ring from Pollux's hand, where it is obviously a firm neat fit. He puts it on his own finger and it is obviously very loose. Once you wear a correctly fitted wedding ring for several years (and no one wears a "loose" ring for any amount of time), your finger "adjusts" to it and it does not look loose (my own looks like my finger has developed a ring shaped depression in the skin). Unless he lost a decent amount of weight on his hands, that ring is a couple of sizes too big and should really have fitted him just as well, if not better, than it fitted Pollux. [He did lose weight. They had to trim him down so he'd look like Pollux. That's why the ring doesn't fit.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
At the end of the movie when Archer goes back home, his hair is the same length it was before his surgery. Since the healing process only takes a couple of days, how did they get his hair to grow back to its old length in a matter of days? [Probably in a similar fashion to how they got his wounds to heal, scarlessly, in an equally short amount of time. It's fictional technology.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
So, they take Cage's face and put on Travolta. Now, they made a big deal about them not having the same blood type. Sure, the face is placed on a plastic mask, but it still needs blood supply. And if the blood types don't match, that's a no-go. Also, when Cage wakes up he smokes a cigarette. And we see the reflection of his face in a pair of glasses. He seems to have both eyelids and lips there, but shouldn't they be on Travolta? And finally.. They give Travolta liposuction to look like Cage who is a lot thinner. When they're turned back in the end, did they just inject all the body fat back in Travolta? Who'd be up for a reversed liposuction after having been skinny? [This procedure is fictional. All of the procedures ar never *fully* explained. As such, none of these mistakes can be counted. They happened because that's the way it works in the world of this film. As far as the eyelids and lips: There are muscles under the skin which were not removed. These are what were seen in the reflection.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
When the faces are taken off they go straight into some kind of liquid. However the liquid does not go red in any way. Wouldn't the blood on the skin mix with the liquid? [There is no way of knowing what this liquid is or what it's properties may be. Perhaps it is meant to keep the blood from leaving the cells. At any rate, without this knowledge, this can't be counted as a mistake.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
How come Archer's wife doesn't notice the switch when she's intimate with her "husband"? I'm pretty sure she would have noticed if his kisses, birthmarks etc. and most of all the private parts would be different, which it's safe to say they are, as at no point of the movie is it noted that the doctors switched anything besides their faces. The doctors didn't implant parts from Archer to Troy, as there was no reason to do this. [They did not only switch their faces, remember at the end when Sean Archer asks the doctors to not put the scar of the bullet back. Plus Archer worked on this case like a maniac, he rarely was at home and didn't have sex with his wife for ages. Well, she has noticed a change, but as the case was closed she thought the change came from that.]
Edit Corrected by Ronnie Bischof
A person's facial appearance is based on the precise shape of their head which is based primarily on their bone structure. Cage and Travolta have noticeably different shaped heads. Simply removing a person's skin from his face and planting on another person's skin in its place would absolutely not change their facial structure in the least bit. [We didn't see the whole surgery and if such a surgery is possible (no infections, wound healing in hours, etc.), it surely is possible for the surgeons to alter the bone structure as well.]
Edit Corrected by Ronnie Bischof
Near the beginning of the film, Castor is at the LA Convention Center setting the bomb. After the scene with the choir singing, there is a shot of the outside marquee that shows a choir convention running from the 18th - 21st. He then tells his boys to stay away from LA on the 18th because it's going to be a bit smoggy (the bomb). Later as Archer, after defusing the bomb, he is told that the targets for the bomb were some judges at a convention or something like that. The dates just don't add up - it was already the 18th when he initially set the bomb. [The choir was only a rehearsal, no audience was there, only a few people, who probably work there. So there are still plenty of days to pass till the 18th. No plot hole there.]
Edit Corrected by Ronnie Bischof
Near the end, when Archer is just about to turn back, he asks the doctor not to put the scar back. It was a top secret mission. Troy says the files and everyone who knew about it were destroyed. There is no way they would have know how to put him back together, let alone put the scar back. [Why would they need the files when Troy's body, which currently looks exactly like Archer's is supposed to, is in their possession?]
Edit Corrected by Tailkinker
The Director of the FBI dies, and his funeral is being attended by the new Acting Director of the FBI and probably other high-ranking officials. Still one of America's most wanted men, Castor Troy, just waltzes into this funeral, armed, and proceeds to start a firefight, with next to no security personnel to be seen. Unlikely. [Early on in the movie, Sean Archer is exasperated by the fact that his "covert antiterrorism team is so secret, that when we snap our fingers, NOTHING HAPPENS," so it's plausible that they tried to keep the funeral of its members secret. Also, Archer(as Castor) enters many hours after the funeral ends. What agent(s) would still be there?]
Edit
There is no way that the doctors would cut Archer's hair and apply cream and laser treatment to match Castor's during the operation. There is completely no point in them doing that and it is something that could have been done after the operation. The only possible reason they would have done it was to be able to work in the "The face itches" joke. [Whether or not it was done deliberately to work in the "joke", the fact remains that in reality such an extreme operation is non-existent in the first place. Whatever procedures were followed before, during and after this mythical operation is up to the filmmakers.]
Edit Corrected by lmao
Never mind that their faces are taken off (and a fast recovery time, as well), but John Travolta is tall with broad shoulders, Nick Cage is short and thin- how did all this get changed? I know plastic surgery is possible- but these two men would need intensive plastic surgery and would need months or years to recover- not several hours! [Cage and Travolta are about the same height, so no mistake there. Also, the plastic surgery that takes place is something that doesn't really exist in the real world. Who's to say that with the revolutionary surgery seen in the movie, that part of the invention was very short recovery times?]
Edit
When Castor Troy (as Sean Archer) defuses the bomb at the L.A. Convention Center, the time stops at two seconds on the bomb's display. Immediately following this, there is a live newscast, and the reporter praises Sean Archer for diffusing the bomb with "one second left." [It's highly unlikely that the reporters would have been allowed to actually see the bomb in question - Troy presumably told them that there was only a second left. It's not as if he's going to care much about accuracy.]
Edit Corrected by Tailkinker
In the scene close to the beginning, when the airplane is taken over by Castor Troy, he opens the door and throws the woman out of the plane. The door is on the left side of the plane. When the plane then crashes though the hangar, we see the left side of the plane, and there is no door on the plane. [From the time when the aircraft leaves the runway until it comes to a stand in the hangar we see the left side of the aircraft 4 times. In the first time the aircraft is to fast, in the second time you can clearly see the doorseal, in the third time you can see the doorhandle on the golden stripes and in the fourth time when the jet bounces down for the last time you can see the doorseal as well.]
Edit Corrected by Ronnie Bischof
How it is that Castor Troy manages to come back to life again? He died from being blown into the wall by the jet engine, but somehow regains consciousness in the lab because his face was removed. Even if he did manage to 'wake up', why does he show no signs of being injured in any way? Surely a knock like that would break many bones, possibly even his back or neck. [It was made very clear that Castor Troy was not dead, he was in a coma. The chain link "wall" gave way which is why he survived the impact.]
Edit
In the final shoot out scene in the church at the end of the movie, Travolta shoots at Cage with a semi-automatic hand gun. However, the shots fired were from a fully automatic firearm. [The weapon used is a Glock 18 machine pistol, which features a fire-selector with both semi-auto and full-auto trigger groups. ]
Edit

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