WINDTALKERS
Heroic Navajos employ a code based on their native language to help
defeat the Japanese in World War II.
(Now in stores)
CAST: Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Peter Stormare, Noah Emmerich, Mark
Ruffalo, Brian Van Holt, Martin Henderson, Roger Willie, Frances O'Connor,
Christian Slater, Jason Isaacs,
DIRECTOR: John Woo
"... fashionably retro in its reverential bugle fanfares and nonstop
flag-flapping...Ranging from the mists of Monument Valley to the shores
of Saipan, 'Windtalkers' is at once chintzy and grandiose, awash in
battlefield sentimentality and platoon clichE`s... Like many Woo projects,
it's an unrequited buddy film, but seemingly written by rote, it has
little of the nuttiness that infused his best Hollywood movies, 'Broken
Arrow' and 'Face/Off'... Less state-of-the-art than 'Black Hawk Down'
in its combat sequences and far more banal in its dramatic conception
than 'The Thin Red Line'...." -- J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
"...Cage is the only reason to check out an otherwise mediocre movie...
I kept wishing I was watching a documentary about the wartime Navajos
and what they accomplished instead of all this specious Hollywood
hoo-ha...Woo builds an entire movie around the unsubstantiated premise
that a Marine would have been ordered to kill a fellow Marine. We
don't need such trumpery in order to buy into a real-life story that
has more than enough heart to begin with...As befits a John Woo movie,
the combat scenes have some panache, but not enough. His multicamera
slo-mo balletics don't really conjure up the heat of battle; they
conjure up other John Woo movies." --Peter Rainer, New York
"The battle sequences are exhausting, violent and overwhelming, but
it's the story of how the Navajo used their native language to invent
a secret military code the Japanese could never break that makes this
movie memorable...It would have been illegal for any Marine to be
ordered to kill a fellow Marine. The premise is pure poetic license,
but it does make for a great moral dilemma. Hell, it's a John Woo
movie, not a documentary...It's like the first 25 minutes of 'Saving
Private Ryan' stretched over two hours. I liked it a lot, but the
weak and the skittish are hereby warned." --Rex Reed, The New York
Observer
"I was reminded of 'Glory,' the story of heroic African-American troops
in the Civil War, which was seen through the eyes of their white commanding
officer. Why does Hollywood find it impossible to trust minority groups
with their own stories?...we get way, way, way too much footage of
bloody battle scenes, intercut with thin dialogue scenes that rely
on exhausted formulas...Although Woo is Asian, he treats the enemy
Japanese troops as pop-up targets, a faceless horde of screaming maniacs
who run headlong into withering fire...The Navajo code talkers have
waited a long time to have their story told. Too bad it appears here
merely as a gimmick in an action picture." --Roger Ebert, Chicago
Sun-Times
"Woo, like so many war-movie directors, insults our intelligence when
he has enemy troops obligingly hurl themselves into the line of American
fire and then fall down in heaps. Some of the most eloquent moments
in the movie are more intimate--Nicolas Cage's increasing sunken-eyed
weariness, the slowly acquired, half-humiliating savagery of Adam
Beach's Ben Yahzee...Even though we can see it coming, this gruff,
inarticulate, half-embarrassed love between men, arrived at after
many setbacks, is one of the stories that action movies never tire
of telling and that many of us, even though we may laugh it off the
next day, still find moving." --David Denby, The New Yorker
" Woo is his generation's preeminent orchestrator of violence, someone
who truly loves the smell of napalm in the morning...So his attraction
to the astronomical bullet and body count of World War II was only
a matter of time. The resulting 'Windtalkers,' however, is not all
it might have been, an oddly old-fashioned film from a director who's
usually anything but...After what we've seen recently in 'We Were
Soldiers' and especially 'Black Hawk Down,' these battle scenes seem
a tad formulaic, as does the film's story... With a body count rising
to computer-game levels, these combat sequences are more numbing than
exciting, an exhausting display of purposeless firepower. Even John
Woo, it seems, can fall victim to carnage overkill." --Kenneth Turan,
The Los Angeles Times
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