A Sappy Screenplay

Rating: 5/10 (23 November 2002)

A well-paced second half almost redeems John Woo's war picture, which suffers from a first half bogged down by awkward exposition and some amazingly corny dialogue throughout courtesy of screenwriters John Rice and Joe Batteer. Though he attempts to bring a heightened realism to the genre (a la `Saving Private Ryan' and `The Thin Red Line'), Woo seems stuck in a forties time warp when it comes to character development and interaction (everyone's here: the racially divided loners, the white bigot, the Greek, the Italian, etc.) and the material's surface skimming is frustrating. But there's an interesting performance from Nicolas Cage as a tormented World War II Marine assigned to protect (along with counterpart Christian Slater) the code needed to attack the Japanese on Sai-Pan; that the code is held by two Navajos is less important than the code talkers not being captured alive and forms the crux of Cage's dilemma as he begins to form an uneasy bond with one of them (Adam Beach). Cage, who has a tendency to overplay, remains fairly sullen and though he threatens at times to explode into parody thanks to the sappy screenplay, he manages to stay in character for the duration and any sympathy we feel towards him is well-earned. After the impersonal hack job Woo did on `Mission: Impossible II', he seems gratified to return to his usual theme of male bonding between opposites and while the setting should be a good one for him, the bad writing keeps the film from coming alive. Jeffrey L. Kimball's sharp cinematography is a plus.