John Woo's second-worst American movie

Rating: 5/10 (21 October 2002)

The sad thing about Windtalkers is how utterly ordinary and conventional it is. It's not good, it's not bad, it's not interesting but neither is it boring, it's got an interesting idea for a plot, it doesn't make much use of that idea. It's the definition of a five on a scale of ten. It's better than Mission Impossible 2, still John Woo's worst American movie, but it's so much worse than Woo's greatest Hong Kong films that it's depressing.
You can mark off all the items on your John Woo Checklist (birds flying? check! two guys pointing guns at each other? check! male bonding? check! Catholic imagery? check!) but they mean nothing beyond the checklist. He takes the fascinating concept of Navajo Marines using their native language as an unbreakable-to-the-Japanese code during WWII, and then barely uses that code during the 2+ hours of the film. He takes a movie ostensibly about those Navajos, and turns it into a movie about Nicolas Cage. Perhaps most unfortunate, this great Asian filmmaker turns every Japanese character into a faceless, killing nonentity. Windtalkers isn't a disappointment ... how could it be after the disaster that was MI2? It's just a hollow dud.