The Woo Method En-Masse

Rating: Null/10 (3 September 2003)

Ever sine Face/Off, Hollywood has wanted to exploit the one talent John Woo has...cinematography. I admit that most of the time his scripts and plots are absolute garbage (Broken Arrow, Hard-Boiled) and sometimes he is stuck with terrible acting (Hard Target), but, let's face it, Woo needs Chow Yun-fat as much as CYF needs Woo. The two are a film 'item', one of the few great combinations of an actor and a director to make repeated visions of the same thing.
Enter Windtalkers: many "great" directors have tried their hands at war (Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick, Oliver Stone, etc.), but this has to be the worst rendition I have seen yet! There are so many unnecessary subplots and scenes that the Windtalkers falls into a level of stereotype and idiocy not seen since the days of John Wayne.
As in the case of Blackhawk Down, the whole 'plot' is merely a leapfrog from one explosion-laden, cornball heroics-filled, slow-motion infested shoot-'em up. Perhaps since Spielberg had more time to work on Private Ryan without having to worry so hard about imitation, he made a better film because of it. Woo is too worried about using his same style over and over that the movie becomes as bad as Mission: Impossible 2.
The Woo Method, as I call it, is a 'script doctoring' process wherein any holes in the plot or shallowness in characters can be solved by throwing another gunfight to the audience like milkbones. Many other directors have this problem, even the Wachowski brothers. Woo's cinematography is almost total parody and I am sorry for James Horner for getting taken into this project. No composer I can think of right now should have been involved.
Nicolas Cage isn't as effective this time around. I am sorely disappointed that he was stuck with a cliche role ripped straight from The Big Red One. Actually, the whole movie is nothing more than John Woo's version of The Thin Red Line--all the same nuances and attempts at being creative are here, but none of Malick's spirit is present.
Overall, this is a bad movie. Don't see it. 1.5 out of 5 stars.