Noisy but the lack of story and lack of unique style in the action just leaves it as a fairly run-of-the-mill war action movie

Rating: Null/10 (25 July 2005)

After a disastrous military command where he lost all his men and part of his hearing, Sergeant Joe Enders wants back into the action. Faking his way through his medical he is soon back in action, charged to protect a "windtalker" one of the Navajo Marines who are used as code talkers to keep radio signals secret from the enemy; protect him that is, unless capture is imminent in which case Joe is to kill his charge. Put together with Private Ben Yahzee, Joe struggles to keep it together in battles where his rage drives him on, but his growing friendship with Joe threatens his entire mission.
Despite the names involved with this project, nothing else about it really grabbed me when it came out at the cinema; the action just looked noisy and the story looked like it would be lost in all that. Never let it be said that you can tell nothing from the trailers because it turns out that this is exactly what the film is like. The story is interesting in terms of a very basic piece of history but, beyond the one-sentence summary, there isn't really anything to learn. Being mostly fictionalised, the script still needed to create its own story to hook me and mostly it failed to do this. I never got involved with the characters and the few scenes where they share some corny dialogue or fire guns with a haunted "terrible-regret-and-hurt-in-my-past-that-I-can't-let-go-of" look in their eyes were not enough to create interest. Unsurprisingly the massive, noisy battle scenes dominate the film (easily without much to compete with them) and for many viewers these will do the job  for me they at least provided energy in the film.
However what surprised me was just how unexciting they were. So much is going on, so many things are blowing up that it is difficult to really get into it. Yes, in Face/Off and the likes, we had everything blowing up but that was fun and done all in the name of pure silly entertainment. With this I think Woo felt he couldn't make was "fun" so he seems to have lost his style, his unique flair for action and his ability to produce some very big, overblown, outrageous action. It is all visually impressive but partly down to the lack of style and partly down to the lack of substance I just didn't think it was anything special to make it stand out. In fact, this last criticism could go for the cast too  which was a surprise when you consider the names involved.
Cage has clearly been told by Woo to do that "crazy, slightly haunted look" and to do it over and over again, so that is what he spends most of the film doing. The rest of it he spends looking soft and wounded as he stops worrying and learns to love his Indian. Beach is pretty and he does make for an attractive character but the lack of depth leaves him pulling faces and jumping around just like everyone else. Considering his high-billing, Slater appeared to just walk in and out of the film as if he was required somewhere else. Stomare does nothing much but then nor do Emmerich, Ruffalo, Issacs and others who you would expect of at least being interesting.
Overall this is not a poor film, it is just a very average and unmemorable one. The lack of a good character-based story (or story full stop) means that the noisy action dominates and, without any unique style, flair or real excitement to that, it does become rather tiresome after a while. Of course if this is all you are after then it is probably noisy and violent enough but you should bare in mind three things: 1) there are more exciting action movies out there, 2) there are more meaningful war movies out there and, 3) there are much better John Woo films out there. With so many options, it is no wonder that I'll not be watching Windtalkers again anytime soon.