Heroes Shed No Tears II

Rating: 3/10 (28 October 2002)

Anyone who has seen John Woo's appallingly comic-bookish early HK actioner, Heroes Shed No Tears, will understand the summary line after watching Windtalkers.
I'm a HUGE fan of Woo's Triad shoot-em-ups, esp Hard Boiled, but his lackluster Hollywood efforts have taught me to keep my expectations low. Still, I wasn't prepared for a regression of this magnitude.
Woo's style is completely out of place for any kind of film with historical import. I kept shaking my head during battle sequences, wondering "What were they thinking?" Every grenade, bomb, and shell seems loaded with gasoline, and the gunplay is absurd. There was very little (if any) tactical sense to the battles, and the battlefield deaths were so impersonal or hackneyed they lost any intended "horror of war" effect. The discontinuity between the terrain and foliage of the establishing shots of Saipan and the character scenes was so severe, I really wonder if anyone was in control of this movie. Was there no military/historical advisor on the set?
It's a shame that the true tactical and strategic importance of the Navajo codetalkers (peripheral to this film, as it turned out, and hamhandedly implemented when addressed) had to be frittered away on this film. Like Pearl Harbor, it's not likely to be revisited soon. Without knowing firsthand, I'd say The Thin Red Line recreates the terror of island fighting in a much much more realistic manner. Woo, the action god, needs to stick with quasi-exotic urban locales with gangsters and good guys.