Hot Air 1/10

Rating: 1/10 (21 April 2004)

Warning: SPOILERS
If you live in the UK, a good guide to the quality of any movie is the review it gets in the best-selling 'News of The World' Sunday paper. Because the NoW's critical faculties are arguably less than those of an ant, a good review equals lousy movie; bad review: probably worth seeing. On which basis, the endorsement `One of the best war movies of all time -- News of the World' that features on the cover of the UK DVD Collector's Edition says it all: here indeed is one of the worst war movies of all time.
Quite why it should've been so is mystifying, for in the subject of the Navajo code talkers there's a genuinely interesting story: how they were recruited, the dilemmas they faced in signing up to war, the problems of integration, the heroism they showed and the regrettable secrecy that for so long obscured the nature of their contribution. . . in the hands of half-way proficient moviemakers, the code talkers' tale would've made for first class cinema.
Instead we get 129 tedious minutes of pyrotechnic mayhem, and a plot so ludicrous it's astonishing it even survived first pitch: that a codetalker has to be 'protected' by a guardian angel lest he fall into the hands of the enemy. Oh really?
The premise might've had some passing credibility had director Woo understood that remaking 'War and Peace' was not, in this instance, A Good Idea. But no: Woo moves remorselessly from one major league set-piece to another, in every one of which bombs, bullets, bayonets and shells rain down upon the unfortunate Navajo from left, right, behind, in front and above (thus making Nicolas Cage's advice to `make sure you follow my ass if you want to stay alive' one of the transparently daftest script lines of recent memory).
Far from taking care of the windtalker / codetalker, the US Army ensures - in this movie at least - that he has a survivability prospect of thirty seconds. Still, he is assisted by Cage, whose uncanny ability to survive veritable hails of gunfire is in inverse proportion to his ability to act: you'd have thought 'Captain Correlli's Mandolin' would've been disaster enough but no, Cage goes for broke in this one, distraught, depressed, dysfunctional, and alarmingly indiscriminating when it comes to shooting people (his own, and the enemy).
The good news though is that he doesn't get to play a musical instrument.
Two sequences do, however, stand out in this turgid mess. In the first, Cage allows himself to be captured by the enemy whilst pretending to be a prisoner of his Navajo charge, this sleight of hand being accomplished thanks to the fact that Adam Beach (who plays the Navajo) looks, er, Japanese.
Woo seems not to have noted that Beach doesn't even look like a Navajo, let alone a Japanese, but then, nor does the enemy, which for reasons known only to writers John Rice and Joe Batteer decides in this screenplay to implement a policy of actually taking prisoners instead of shooting all Americans on sight.
But perhaps they guessed it was Nicolas Cage.
In the second sequence, Cage rolls drunkenly around a battlefield graveyard, weeping for the souls of all the men who were killed when he was single-handedly taking the Solomon Islands at the start of the movie. (Seeing as they were spared from the rest of 'Windtalkers', it's not at all clear why anyone should feel sorry for them). Anyway, Cage rolls around, and the non-Navajo non-Japanese lookalike Beach comes to his aid. . . and brushes against a cardboard cross which promptly falls over.
Yup. That's how they did it during the war. Buried each individual soldier under a highly photogenic if insubstantial cardboard cross. And never mind the tropical rainstorms.
Still, at least it's consistent: cardboard plot, cardboard direction, cardboard acting.
VERDICT: Depressingly inept; a missed opportunity -- considering the nature of the source material -- and, sadly, yet another question mark over John Woo's career.
RATING: 1/10.