Kaboom

Rating: Null/10 (29 May 2002)

Bang! Kapow! Kaboom! Wind Talkers is the sort of ground-beef-ballet-meets-comic-book that you expect from war films post Private Ryan, and it delivers a stunning Dolby Digital onslaught of amputations, immolations and the odd decapitation with an in-yer-face style that sometimes splatters the camera lens with fake blood, and certainly makes it a mistake to sit too close to the screen. But in this war, the first casualty was the script.
On the surface, the film is the story a group of Navajo radio operators who communicated in a code that the Japanese couldn't break. The Wind Talkers' are a fascinating addition to the category of forgotten war heroes'. At least we think so, because John Woo seems far more excited by making chunks of tank, mud and US Marine fly through the air. Our Navajo heroes (Adam Beach as Private Ben Yahzee and Roger Willie and Private Charles Whitehorse) have a home life that's filled in by casual conversations during route marches. The perfunctory training' scenes seem more like a game show. Navajo customs are sketched in by other marines being given lines like: What's he doing now?' while watching Yahzee or Whitehorse pray. What did their families think about the Navajo fighting to protect the people who had slaughtered them only two generations ago? What were living conditions like for the Navajo before the war? Did the war help to integrate them in American society? Who cares, the film says, watch what we can do with a flame thrower and a couple of stunt men.
Between battles, Woo concentrates his camera on Nicolas Cage as Sergeant Joe Enders, the archetypal Marine Who Has Seen Too Much. Often, Enders stares vacantly into space while hearing gunfire and explosions in a clear homage to that classic study of a man facing his demons, Airplane. Enders gets a special mission to guard Navajo radio operator Yahzee  but actually, his secret mission is to guard The Code. So no Navajo can fall into enemy hands alive, which means a terrible secret duty if Yahzee looks like being captured before he is killed. But Cage's responsibility doesn't end there. He also has to interact with the film's token female, Frances O'Connor playing a nurse who doggedly keeps writing letters to Cage. He refuses to open them until he has killed every Japanese soldier he can see, which, this being a battlefield created by Woo, is very many indeed. By the end of the film, his pack must have been mostly full of envelopes, because each time the gunfire calms down for a few seconds, someone else pops a letter into his hand. Occasionally he looks at it and grimaces, signalling mental torture. No way! He resolves, I'm not reading it! What do you think this is, a chick flick?
The film doesn't waste too much time developing the supporting cast, because that would leave less time for blowing them up in slow motion later on. (If you find yourself in a Woo film, and Cage turns round and says to you, No one else is going to die', you know it's probably not the percentage bet). Other marines are distinguished mostly by regional accents or unusual facial hair, and take turns in explaining the plot to each other and complain about The Brass', giving Cage plenty of room to stare into the middle distance. Occasionally, given the hokiness of the dialog, it looks more like he's trying not to laugh.
This means it's a long two and a half hours. The battle scenes are beautiful, chilling and visceral, but the bits in between are really just devices to move the slaughter to a new location. There's even a little map with American flags moving forward and Japanese flags in retreat. The story of the Wind Talkers is fascinating, but this film isn't it.