Replete with Cage's finest angsty acting and John Woo's requisite concerns of friendship and rivalry in the face of violence.
Comment
09/19/08
Windtalkers (2002)
33
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:165
Fresh:54
Rotten:111
Average Rating:5.1/10
Consensus: The action sequences are expertly staged. Windtalkers, however, sinks under too many clichés and only superficially touches upon the story of the code talkers.
Runtime: 2 hrs 34 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: WINDTALKERS begins quietly--with widescreen aerial shots of clouds that gradually clear to reveal the beautiful mesas of Monument Valley. A bus collects Navajo volunteers Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach)... [More]
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Christian Slater, Peter Stormare
Director: John Woo
Reviews for Windtalkers
Top CriticThe screenwriters struggle to integrate the coded transmissions with the action, and the flamboyant set piece battles feel like so much empty rhetoric.
01/26/06
Top CriticA vast repository of hoary, honour-code clichés.
10/19/03
Top CriticWhat should be a moving story with spectacular battle scenes by one of the world's greatest action directors is a huge let-down.
02/02/03
Top CriticIt comfortably emerges as the best of the recent war flicks.
10/30/02
A merely competent action war pic, boasting neither Woo's trademark balletic violent set-pieces nor any convincing insight into the tensions between the native Americans and their Anglo-Saxon commanders in the Marine Corps.
10/02/02
Top CriticIf Windtalkers is overlong and hopelessly overwrought, it is also thrilling and beautiful.
09/03/02
In the wake of Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers, you are likely to be as heartily sick of mayhem as Cage's war-weary marine.
08/20/02
Top CriticWoo simply seems lost in all the emotional claptrap, war movie cliches, cornball dialog and mumbo jumbo about bravery and patriotism.
06/10/02
The energy and conviction of the action sequences don't quite compensate for Windtalkers' emotional cliches and historical heedlessness.
09/19/08
Top CriticA powerful premise turned into a stubbornly flat, derivative war movie.
09/19/08
Top CriticWith Windtalkers, the glaring refutations of time, space and reality impress upon viewers the simple fact that Woo is at his best when he isn't attempting anything more significant than the most emptily satisfying explosion you're likely to enjoy - a scat
07/02/08
What we get is a surprisingly entertaining film, corny as it is at times, that could have suited John Wayne. [Published 5-13-02]
12/19/05
This is the kind of film where you think you can predict everything that’s going to happen upon the first shot and you spend the rest of the film praying that you’re wrong. But it’s fun getting there.
12/06/05
I didn't expect a comedy.
10/07/04
Too celebratory of Woo's good guy-versus-bad guy, buddy-buddy ethos of action movies to rise above the limitations of the genre, and too obsessed with its own seriousness to be a truly 'serious' film.
02/01/04
You’d probably be better off reading Catch 22 – even if it is for the fifth time . . .
09/24/03
A premissa é interessante, mas o terceiro ato do filme, quando Cage e Beach se tornam indestrutíveis, estraga o filme.
07/25/03
It’s tough to get worked up after watching superior films like Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers.”
06/13/03
Sure, he directs the heck out of gun battles and hand-to-hand combat, paying loving attention to each grunt, spurt and grimace, but there is something unseemly about the agony of war serving as fodder for yet another of Woo's sensational spectacles.
05/20/03
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August 20, 2001:
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