Windtalkers Review

by Eugene Novikov (eugenen AT wharton DOT upenn DOT edu)
July 29th, 2002

Windtalkers (2002)
Reviewed by Eugene Novikov
http://www.ultimate-movie.com/

Starring Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Christian Slater, Noah Emmerich, Peter Stormare, Mark Ruffalo, Jason Isaacs.

Directed by John Woo.

Rated R.

"Your job is to protect the code."
Windtalkers is a startlingly poor war movie from action meistro John Woo, patronizing and melodramatic. In fairness, Woo, whose American credits include Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2 has never been known for understated conflict, but he is renowned for being an incomparable technician, the master of fast-paced action violence. The real shock, then, is how badly the war scenes in Windtalkers turn out. Johnny, we hardly knew ye.

Nicolas Cage, whose career has been in an undeniable slump since working with Scorcese three years ago, plays Sergeant Joe Enders, a WWII fighter who loses all the men in his charge while following orders to hold his ground at all costs. Now, he has been promoted/demoted -- depends on whom you ask -- to protecting Private Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach), a Navajo Indian who speaks the ostensibly unbreakable new military code the US has designed with the assistance of the Indians.

Enders joins Sergeant "Ox" Henderson (Christian Slater), also assigned to protecting a codetalker, in guiding Private Yahzee through the bloody dangerous Battle of Saipan. He befriends Yahzee, and he and Henderson begin to ruminate on their orders to kill their codetalkers if they are under any threat of being captured alive. Before we know it, Henderson and his charge, named Charlie Whitehorse, are playing a sincere duet of flute and harmonica, and Yahzee is inviting Enders to come visit him in Navajo country.
Woo's battlefield scenes are entirely theatrical, all anguished close-ups, unnatural slow motion and hammy acting. The inevitable wartime gore mixed into all of this seems almost out of place in the midst of his grandiosely staged posturing; there's no spontaneity in these proceedings, with no evident attempt to make the on-screen mayhem seem less obviously. When we see Cage's face fill the screen, screaming in agony, we feel not like we're watching a disturbed World War II soldier, but a bad production of Titus Andronicus.

Things get even worse when Woo moves away from the war action and into the melodramatic trappings of the actual story. The aforementioned musical duet is every bit as excruciating as it sounds, an execrably patronizing attempt to combine Wartime Male Bonding with Mutual Cultural Acceptance. Indeed, the movie wants to bang this message into our heads, though at the same time it begs the question -- one pretty much beaten to death by other critics -- of why this seldom-told true story of Navajo Indians assisting in the war effort had to be told through the conduit of an Italian-American, especially when said story has little to teach us except "tolerance."

Cries of outrage were heard everywhere when Bruckheimer & Bay unleashed Pearl Harbor on the world last year. The movie, with its sub-Titanic love story and gung-ho jingoism cheapened the tragedy, it was said, reducing it to teenage-girl fodder with Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett standing there looking pretty. While Windtalkers isn't quite as heinous -- neither Affleck nor Hartnett are in sight -- it does much the same thing, taking a story that should be told and diluting it with thoughtless clichÎs, overblown melodrama, and the last thing we'd expect from a guy like John Woo: dull, static, unexciting filmmaking.

Grade: C

Up Next: Minority Report

©2002 Eugene Novikov

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