Windtalkers *** (Nicolas Cage, Christian Slater, Adam Beach) – Classic Film Review 1218

US sergeants Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater are assigned to protect Navajo marines (Adam Beach, Roger Willie) using their native speech as an undecypherable radio code while fighting the Japanese in Saipan in 1943.

Cage reunites with his 1997 Face/Off director, John Woo, in 2002 for an impressive, scarily in-your-face, big-budget war movie. This is a fascinating, unusual war film, and the gore-splattered battle scenes are expertly staged by Woo and the performances are strong and solid.

However the story’s spiritual elements are clumsily handled in John Rice and Joe Batteer’s well-meaning but unsubtle screenplay that thumps its message with a sledgehammer and is marred by the shaky, naive attempt to deal with spiritual and racial issues.

Noah Emmerich, Peter Stormare, Mark Ruffalo, Brian Van Holt, Martin Henderson, Frances O’Connor and Jason Isaacs also star.

It runs 134 minutes but the director’s cut runs 153 minutes.

The film reportedly cost $115million, but only made just under $41million at the US box-office with a total of $77.6 million worldwide. The release was delayed several times and it received mostly negative reviews. It was criticised for featuring the Navajo characters only in supporting roles and centring it on Cage’s white character. Filming locations on Hawaii include Kualoa Ranch, the location where Lost and Jurassic Park were shot.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1218

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/

Adam Beach as Private Ben Yahzee.