WINDTALKERS
Released: June 14, 2002
John Woo came to America with his bag of tricks ready. He dazzled us with his pre-Hollywood movies like "A Better Tomorrow" and "Hard Boiled" - both with Chow Yun Fat. Even his modestly budgeted American debut "Hard Target" with Jean-Claude Van Damme was pretty entertaining. Then came the HUGE budgeted "Broken Arrow", "Face/Off" and "Mission: Impossible 2". Far from me suggesting this is the downward spiral of Woo's career, I just sense that, while technically able, he just doesn't have much left in the bag of tricks department. So, OK, he branches out with "Windtalkers", starring Nicolas Cage as a wounded WW2 Marine who weasels his way back into service. But rather than "killing Japs" as he thought, he is now a babysitter to a Navajo "code talker", part of a bunch of Navajos that were used in the war to utilize their native language as an unbreakable radio cypher that the Japanese can't break. The setting is the island of Saipan, which America set out to take over in what turned out to be a bloody attack made less bloody thanks to the Navajos. Cage's character is assigned to protect the code talker played by Canadian Adam Beach. Er, rather, Cage is assigned to protect the code itself - at all costs. Rather than focus on the more interesting code talking aspects, Woo centers the movie around Cage's character who is far less interesting. The battle scenes as staged by Woo are some of the most brutally terrifying imagery since "Saving Private Ryan" or Mel Gibson's "We Were Soldiers" and play out with technical superiority but serve about the same purpose as the death-filled attack scenes in "Pearl Harbor". Exactly how many people do we NEED to see get blown up over and over again? Do we really need to be shown just how brutally horrible war is? Maybe, since we seem to have new wars all the time, but still... Also appearing are Christian Slater who starred in the earlier Woo flick "Broken Arrow", Noah Emmerich and Peter Stormare - a Swede deperately trying to deliver an American accent with painful results. You may recall Stormare as the Russian astronaut in "Armageddon" or the silent one in "Fargo". Anyways, if brutally played out war violence with a brief historical glimpse into the Navajo code talkers interests you, see "Windtalkers". If you're looking for the John Woo magic of yesterday, just go rent "Hard Boiled" instead. Oddly enough, Woo couldn't or wouldn't use CG for the battleship scenes and elected to use obviously old stock footage. And another thing which trivia fans will appreciate, "Windtalkers" was ready for release in the Summer of 2001 yet MGM elected to "save" it for Summer 2002...
MGM/UA
133 Minutes