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.
Comment
08/20/02
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 CriticReplete 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 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 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
If Windtalkers is overlong and hopelessly overwrought, it is also thrilling and beautiful.
09/03/02
The 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 CriticIt comfortably emerges as the best of the recent war flicks.
10/30/02
a film that would make Randall Wallace blush... an outrageous collection of war movie clichés
06/22/02
Are we so deeply immersed in guilt for not telling the code-talkers' story sooner that we should pretend that Windtalkers' facile melodrama doesn't belittle their efforts?
06/12/02
Woo's fights have a distinct flair. His warriors collide in balletic explosion that implies an underlying order throughout the chaos.
06/14/02
An old-fashioned war movie that mires in mediocrity.
06/14/02
About the best that can be said for Windtalkers is that it’s a John Woo movie. It’s too bad it’s not a good John Woo movie
07/29/02
For anyone in the mood for an unusual kind of war movie, Windtalkers is talking your language.
06/13/02
It's mired in a shabby script that piles layer upon layer of Action Man cliché atop wooden dialogue and a shifting tone that falls far short of the peculiarly moral amorality of [Woo's] best work.
06/16/02
Woo wanted the film to be realistic, and it is. The violence is unrelenting, the uniforms are dirty and mismatched, the weapons are shiny from use, the soldiers are exhausted, sick, sad.
06/14/02
Click to read the article
06/15/02
Top CriticThere is little to be done with John Rice and Joe Batteer's cliché-ridden script, which falls back time and time again on the conventions of the film's genre.
06/10/02
A man leaving the screening said the film was better than Saving Private Ryan. He may have meant the Internet short Saving Ryan's Privates. But Windtalkers doesn't beat that one, either.
06/14/02
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