The screenwriters struggle to integrate the coded transmissions with the action, and the flamboyant set piece battles feel like so much empty rhetoric.
Comment
01/26/06
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: Action/Adventure
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 CriticIf Windtalkers is overlong and hopelessly overwrought, it is also thrilling and beautiful.
09/03/02
Replete with Cage's finest angsty acting and John Woo's requisite concerns of friendship and rivalry in the face of violence.
09/19/08
Top CriticIt comfortably emerges as the best of the recent war flicks.
10/30/02
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 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 CriticA 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 CriticWoo simply seems lost in all the emotional claptrap, war movie cliches, cornball dialog and mumbo jumbo about bravery and patriotism.
06/10/02
A vast repository of hoary, honour-code clichés.
10/19/03
Top CriticDespite the promise of a Native American history lesson, Cage hogs most of the film, overshadowed only by the spectacle of it all and an annoying score.
06/14/02
Top CriticClick to read the article
06/15/02
Top CriticClick to read the article
06/15/02
Top CriticIt's a film so terrifically inept, on so many levels of direction, performance and intent, that it demands and receives its audience's full, stunned attention.
06/18/02
A powerful and involving film that bears the unmistakeable imprint of the greatest action director of our time.
06/06/02
What begins as the enlightening story of unsung heroes turns into a standard war drama, full of tiresome predictability.
06/13/02
While not coming up with anything new or particularly original, Woo makes the genre sing like a chorus on steroids.
06/13/02
An old-fashioned war movie that mires in mediocrity.
06/14/02
The Navajos deserve better.
06/13/02
This is John Woo's worst film, a major letdown.
06/20/02
Latest News for Windtalkers
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August 20, 2001:
Painstakingly choreographed battle scenes exposed actors and cameramen to as many as 280 bombs, and at least one close call. 
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