More splatterfest than Friday the 13th

Rating: 1/10 (15 June 2002)

Let me be harsh here. I ponder what went wrong inside John Woo's head when he made this stinkbomb? Has he finally succumbed to the big dollars of Hollywood, so much that he has the nerve to make movies like M:I2? Although Windtalkers is nowhere as bad, nonetheless its still a shallow exercise in style. I sat down with a couple of friends, and throughout the movie we were bombarded with nothing but the sounds of guns, explosions, and flying corpses. Never once the movie made me feel the destructive power of mankind's stupidity. Even though some war movies depicts a lot of violence, movies like Saving Private Ryan was never gratituous. Windtalkers - or John Woo - is more in love with explosions, slo-mo gunfights and painfully cliched dialogues than its purported subject. At the end, I asked myself "Where on earth were those noble Navajo Indians???" Like many people, the "subject" of the story drew me into buying a ticket. On the big screen, the Native Americans have rarely been portrayed correctly (which also can be said to many minorities living in the states). So I thought everyone will finally get to see them being heroic and brave, and Windtalkers does that to an extent, but not nearly enough. Alas their presence and contributions here were so numbed down, and instead we get too much of Nick Cage's character, (whose job here is to sell movie tickets) looking like a madman spraying bullets to no end. Why can't we get Windtalkers starring a real Navajo Indian anyway? The entire movie feels like a false advertisement to me.