Amazon.co.uk Review
John Woo's reputation as the world's best action director hits a major breakdown with
Windtalkers, an overlong, over-silly, overwritten and overacted entry in the current American craze for war movies that combine extreme patriotism with hordes of Yankee extras getting bloodily cut to pieces until a final uplifting victory. US Marine Nicolas Cage--with a scarred ear and a fed-up look--is given the job of looking after Navajo Adam Beach, whose complex language is the basis of a code being used to fool the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. His orders are to protect not Beach but the code, (including orders to kill Beach if it looks like capture is imminent) which makes for an uneasy progress from hatred-at-first-sight through growing respect to agonised male bonding.
From an interesting historical footnote, Woo and his collaborators spin out an unlikely and repetitive platoon story, with an all-cliché bunch of grunts spitting out hardboiled dialogue between the noise and violence. The Woo touch is evident; from the astonishing pullback from a butterfly over bloodied waters to the thick of hand-to-hand fighting, but too many of the battle scenes are just more explosions-and-body-parts along the same lines of Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down.
On the DVD: Windtalkers contains an 11-minute TV filler making-of featurette; footage of the entire cast (except Cage) romping through the research process at Actors' Bootcamp; plus on-set diaries, i.e., B-roll footage of the crew working on four big action scenes. Of the two commentary tracks, the first offers a lot of mutual stroking with the occasional insight from Cage and Slater, the other offers Navajo actor Roger Willie and real-life codetalker/technical advisor Albert Smith. The language options, for soundtrack and subtitles, are English and (oddly) Czech. --Kim Newman
Special Features
- Bravo Special – Behind the scenes ‘making of’ featurette with the cast and crew. Includes interviews with Nicolas Cage and John Woo
- Actors’ Bootcamp – Made exclusively for the DVD, this brilliant featurette follows the actors through a gruelling few weeks of real-life marine training that Woo, who drafted in real American army soldiers to appear in the film, sent them on to bring the true essence of war and camararderie to the film.
- Fly on the Set Diaries – 4 raw set pieces that observe the construction of 4 key battle scenes, bringing the true nature of filming to life with explosive close-up action. Viewers can also jump to that specific scene in the film.
- Audio commentaries – 2 revealing feature length commentaries with Cage and Christian Slater, and Navajo’s Albert Smith and Roger Willie
- Behind the Scenes Photo Gallery
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