Once upon a time, the idea of John Woo doing a war movie would be enough to make the hairs stand up on the neck of any, serious action-phile as the legendary director’s popular themes of brotherhood, honor and male bonding while trying to avoid a fusillade of bullets whizzing all over the place. While long term Woo-ites may well feel the need to bring up that the maestro of mayhem has already done a war movie with the Vietnam set Bullet In The Head, that film actually kept the more classic forms of warfare to a minimum, focusing more on the leads trying to make out of the country alive after pulling a get rich quick sheme that goes disastrously wrong.
So in 2002, Woo finally got to tackle the chaos of war properly with Windtalkers, a war flick that aimed to springboard off the success of Face/Off and M:I 2 to give the director a shot at something a bit more prestigious than the braying accolades from explosion lovers and fans of heroic bloodshed. The problem was, no one seemed to tell Woo…
Dedicated US Marine corporal Joe Enders has been through some serious shit during World War II already after being the only survivor from his unit that met a bloody end during a battle on the Solomon Islands that left one of his ears a charred mess and his state of mind even worse. However, after convincing a pretty nurse help him cheat his way through an ear exam, Joe muscles through his raging PTSD and his scrambled inner ear problems in order to head straight back into battle; but when he gets there he finds he has a new mission assigned to him.
During wartime, the US military fashioned a code from the language of the Navajo tribe which proved to be impossible for the Japanese to break and we watch two such Native American code talkers – childhood friends Ben Yahzee and Charlie Whitehorse – rise through the ranks and eventually join Joe’s unit. However, there’s a catch. You see, the Navajo code is so unbreakable, the top brass has ensured it that no Native American soldier is to be taken alive if the conflict goes bad, so Enders is assigned to watch Yahzee with the orders to kill him if capture seems imminent while Whitehorse is being shadowed by the idealistic Sgt. Pete Henderson.
At the unit embarks on the invasion of Saipan, some if the men embrace the Navajo in their midst while others feel the need to inflict their bigoted views to the group in general, Joe feels the need to distance himself from tgecman he’s supposed to be babysitting in case the worse case scenario actually happens. However, the friendly and amiable Yahzee insists on cracking Enders’ tough shell in order to get to the chewy bromance possibly lurking inside, but can such a friendship exist when death (or worse) could occur at any moment?
Upon its release, Windtalkers was seen as something as a disappointment as those hoping for the next Saving Private Ryan were confused at Woo’s enthusiasm for masculine melodrama and big booms while fans of the director felt let down by a studio that presumably hoped they had a possible awards winner on their hands. However, like a lot of movies that underperformed during the 2000s, a long overdue rewatch reveals that the truth is located somewhere between the warring factions. The studio obviously was expecting some sort of grandstanding Oscar bait that not only tapped into the plight of noble Native Americans fighting for a country that famously has done massive injustices to their people, but gave Nicolas Cage a chance to reunite with Woo after the identity swapping bombast of Face/Off. However, it becomes pretty apparent that this doesn’t seem to be Woo’s goal at all as his approach to the material seems to be more akin to the exploitation style of the 60s and 70s and instead tonally has more in common with the like of Enzo G. Castellari’s knockabout The Inglorious Bastards than the poignant navel gazing of Terrance Mallick’s The Thin Red Line.
We shouldn’t have been surprised, really. After all Woo has always been a filmmaker that’s worn his heart on his sleeve and as a result, some of the moments of chest beating and declarations of duty frequently feel both impressively hokey and unintentionally chuckle inducing. It also doesn’t help that Cage was starting to enter a more inconsistent phase in his acting career which causes some of his more volcanic outbursts to unintentionally (or at least, I hope it’s unintentional – you never can tell with Cage) come across as parody.
Additionally, Adam Beach’s maguffin slash co-lead is so catoonishly nice and wholesome, his constantly beaming smile seems weirdly at odds with all the death and dirt the movie continuously shovels all around them.
The final issue with Windtalkers is that even though Woo gets to play with some sizable battle scenes, having armies firing at each other as they charge across an exploding field turns out to be significantly different than having two guy fend off the entire mob in a church armed only with duel berettas, a shotgun and a shit-ton of doves. As a result, even though the director gets some great footage of some war time carnage, a lot of the action scenes feel and look pretty much the same and once again, those expecting something more classy might be confused at shots of Cage raking down a clutch of Japanese soldiers while one-arm firing a machine gun like he’s in a Sgt. Rock comic.
However, ditch all pretence of Oscar baiting and an expectation of witnessing some classically vintage Woo and Windtalkers proves to be actually quite fun. The secret is – perversely – to not take the frantic struggle of World War II too seriously the way every war film released after 1998 seemed to treat its subject matter and instead look at it in the same way action adventure movies such as The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare and most things starring John Wayne did, using it as a setting to tell stories of daring do and classic heroism in ways that might not seem culturally sensitive anymore.
But never mind all that. If you can find its wavelength (or break the code, if you will), Windtalkers proves to be a decent, two fisted, war flick that uses its more emotional beats to cover for the fact that Woo wants to do cool shit with a flame thrower or have stuntmen licked by flames as they’re hurled into the air for the umpteenth time by an explosion the size of eighteen blue whale piled on top of one another. Failing that, we also get Cage getting to do more of his trademark screaming, Christian Slater’s harmonica playing nice guy meeting the business end of a katana and early role for a mustachioed Mark Ruffalo that has him emoted clumsily after his squad gets inadvertently pounded by friendly fire.
As war movies, John Woo movies, or even Nic Cage movies go, Windtalkers hardly proves to be devastatingly memorable, but it’s certainly better than history would have you believe and if you can jive with its more gung ho tone, its premise gives Woo plenty of excuses to blow shit up nice – but back during a period where the war movie was supposed to carry a tad more reverence, no one seemed to want to listen to what Windtalkers was saying.
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