Windtalkers (2002)
cast: Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Peter Stormare, Noah Emmerich, Mark Ruffalo, Brian Van Holt, Martin Henderson, Roger Willie, and Christian Slater
director: John Woo

A few minutes into John Woo's latest film, I sat in awe. An hour later, I was still in awe and when the film finally concluded after 2:14 minutes, I was still in awe. Being in awe is not always such a good thing though.

If followers of John Woo dismissed "Broken Arrow" as foreign territory, they haven't a clue what is in store for them now and there is no escape. Albeit the theater doors that seem to become more and more appealing during two plus hours of wretched acting, banal combat sequences, poor special effects, and no depth to be found whatsoever deep in the elephant grass of Saipan (where the bulk of the film is set).

Nicolas Cage, still in the wake of another forgettable WWII film ("Captain Corelli's Mandolin") is the battered vet who lost his entire unit during the film's first combat sequence on the Solomon Islands.

Cage giving another muddled performance, forever asleep at the wheel now, somehow escapes a large blast with a mangled ear and yet another chip added to his soldier.

And so we have two more hours to go.

Cage's Joe Enders character, recently elevated to Sergeant status, returns to the war front at his request. To Sgt. Enders' dismay, he is silhouetted by two Navajo soldiers recently commissioned as code talkers who use their intricate language as means of protecting U.S. radio transmissions (that the Japanese had successfully decoded up until this point, circa 1944).

The Navajo soldiers portrayed by Native American actors Adam Beach ("Smoke Signals") and newcomer Roger Willie (a real-life Navajo-American and Gulf War veteran). Beach manages to show some earnest enthusiasm for his character and a willingness to avoid being stuck on lunch break by his white counterparts. Roger Willie also sidesteps landmines of lazy dialogue and groan-worthy cliched passages by bringing some guts to his performance as the less optimistic stranger in a strange land role.

But what happened to their characters? Sure, Beach and Willie are fine, but "Windtalkers" is much, much, much less about Navajo soldiers fighting in WWII as code talkers than it is about Nicolas Cage contemplating the nightmarish reality of war.

The more appropriate title should have been "Nicolas Cage Goes to War with a Little Help from Navajo."

If you reluctantly sit down to "Windtalkers" (after a boatload of deservingly bad reviews) expecting your run-of-the-mill John Woo action tour de force--look somewhere else--which is supposed to be the point--this is not supposed to be "a John Woo film" in the traditional sense. However, it is ever-present ten minutes into the film (possibly the most grotesquely staged combat direction seen in years) that John Woo can't direct large (or small) combat sequences.

And let's face it "Bullet in the Head" (Woo's Hong Kong produced inspiration of "The Deer Hunter") wasn't a combat war film.

American soldiers wander about chewing on hideous direction when mindless Japanese soldiers appear. They go "aiyah!" The explosions go "boom!" And we go "ugh."

Recently, rumor has it that John Woo will now completely retire from action vehicles. I never thought I would say this...

"Amen."