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Review by Simon Bell |
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SO, 'whale' means 'battleship', 'iron fish' stands for 'submarine' and 'chicken
hawk' is what they said for 'divebomber'... I wonder what the Navajo term
is for fat, over-priced turkey?
It's WWII and the US is getting fed up with the Japanese continually breaking
encrypted military transmissions with apparent ease. Eventually, several hundred
Native American Indians are recruited to use a secret code based on their
own tongue. These Marines are the Windtalkers of the title, their cipher the
only one never to be broken by the Enemy of the East.
The action's set in the Pacific during the 1944 Battle of Saipan (previously
overlooked by Hollywood in favour of the better-documented D-Day Landings
that took place around the same time).
Marines Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage teaming with director John Woo for the second
time) and Ox Anderson (Christian Slater in his supposed Fourth Coming, though
he may have to wait a little while longer for the comeback he's after) are
assigned to protect code-talkers Ben Yahzee and Charlie Whitehorse.
Their orders are to keep the men safe at all costs but to do away with them
quick sharp if they fall into enemy hands. The code is All Important, you
see.
Of course there's conflict here: War-weary Enders is suffering from post-traumatic
stress disorder; he's a dehumanised fighting machine now battling with his
own ethics and the soldier etiquette he's been programmed to serve.
What follows, as Woo wrestles with his themes of friendship among men and
brotherhood triumphing in the face of death, is a stock but slick actioner
in all the form and shape you'd expect from the previous helmer of Hard Boiled
and Face/Off.
There's a smorgasbord of flashy visuals and breathtaking photography but,
much in the vein of Ridley Scott's Black Hawk
Down, while it may look epic in scale, nothing much happens.
With
Windtalkers, despite the cast of over a thousand, the acres and acres of Hawaiian
and Southern Californian locations, the hundreds of vintage WWII era weaponry,
the half a million rounds of ammo and the too-numerous-to-count instances
of pyrotechnic bravado, it's woefully short on circumstance.
At the end, you'll feel a little dizzy maybe. But shell-shocked you certainly
will not.
Click here
to view the trailer...
RELATED STORIES: The Hollywood war machine rumbles into action. Click
here...
