The 1990s were a unique time for box office movies, a decade marked by its own cultural norms and trends. We had romantic comedies that, while delightful in their way, would never hold up to today’s cultural standards. Epic action films that could lean into the just far-out enough global climate catastrophe scenarios that are a little too close to home nowadays. Horror films and thrillers that, for better or worse, reflected age-old gender stereotypes. It was a light-hearted time, and while we all have our favorite movies, there are some in particular that if you are going to rewatch, just fair warning, you might need to laugh off the cringe to be able to enjoy it.
Face/Off (1997)
Nicolas Cage plays a terrorist who has killed an FBI agent, the son of whom is John Travolta. Travolta eventually captures Cage and puts him in a coma. At home celebrating with his wife, he has to deal with his rebellious teenage daughter (meaning she wears heavy makeup and rocks a nose ring). Travolta learns that before being captured, Nicolas Cage planted a bomb somewhere in the city, and only Cage’s convict brother knows where. The only solution is to swipe literal faces between Travolta and Cage through a dubious surgery plan. Somehow, it works (and somehow, the bodies look the same now, too), so Travolta heads to the maximum security prison to get information from the brother. Then the real Nicolas Cage wakes up without a face, forces the surgeon to give him Travolta’s face, and proceeds to wreak havoc, taking over the good guy’s family and framing him for the murder of the surgeon. It goes on, and I won’t spoil it all. But this is an excellently ridiculous classic 90s film; enjoy the over-the-top performances of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta in their respective roles.Â
Runaway Bride (1999)
It’s a favorite 90s romcom where the bride, played by Julia Roberts, keeps running away from men, literally. Richard Gere plays ‘Ike,’ a newspaper columnist who hears about a story of a woman who keeps leaving her fiancees at the altar, and he is determined to get the story of her leaving her new husband – he assumes. He follows her around for weeks (stalker vibes) to write a hit piece on her, interviewing everyone in her life, including her exes. Julia, of course, starts to fall in love with Gere. At a rehearsal dinner for her wedding, for some reason, Gere is made to stand in for her fiancee, and they start making out in front of everyone. The wedding day is a media circus, and Julia gets ready to run again for the 4th time. They try to lock the doors. Will she finally marry, and who? Rewatch this classic dumpster fire to find out.
The Net (1995)
What was this movie about? We’re still unsure, but it has just about anything you could dream of in a 90s thriller: floppy disks, laughable computer viruses that could end the world, hot villains, speedboat escapes, airport hijacking, cell phone tracing, and so on. Honestly, it’s the most 90s film ever made, and the cliches seem to be almost laughing at themselves from sometime in the future. It’s a whirlwind through every paranoia people had during the early days of the (inter)Net. But it has Sandra Bullock as the main character, so it’s still worth a watch, a laugh, and a cringe.
