Woo-den

Rating: 3/10 (11 October 2002)

This is one of those movies that is unintentionally funny and that is the only pleasure you'll get for wading through nearly two and a half hours of this mess. I laughed so hard during the opening battle scene as GI Joe's (Nicholas Cage) men were picked off with the last of them damning Joe for his incompetence. Naturally a senior officer chooses Joe to protect the military's latest Navajo based code from falling into enemy hands.

The special effects are made up of old newsreel footage and low budget ie plainly obvious CGI. You do get to see Christian Slater's forehead act as he plays the mouth-organ in a scene that will have you cringing for the fastforward. And a couple of dummies are strapped into a jeep which is blown up. Why they wasted perfectly good dummies when the likes of Woo and Cage were stood around is anyone's guess.
This is nearly as bad as Mel Gibson's slice of corn on the cob We Were Soldiers but is saved by Mark Ruffalo's Pappas who demonstrates the horrors of war by looking more and more like a prehistoric man. By the end he has degenerated so far that not even a haircut and a shave can save him. Oh and there is a token bigot who sees the error of his ways.
What happened to the John Woo who made The Killer and Hard Boiled? 3/10