DIRECTOR
John
Woo
SCREENWRITER
Graham
Yost
PRODUCERS
Bill Badalato
Terence Chang
Mark Gordon
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Peter Levy
MUSIC
Hans Zimmer
EDITORS
Joe Hutshing
Steve Mirkovich
John Wright
CAST
John Travolta (Vic Deakins)
Christian Slater (Riley Hale)
Samantha Mathis (Terry Carmichael)
Delroy Lindo (Max Wilkins)
Bob Gunton (Pritchett)
Frank Whaley (Giles Prentice)
Howie Long (Kelly)
Vondie Curtis-Hall (Rhodes)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 108m
U.S. release: February 9, 1996
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other John
Woo films
reviewed on this website:
- Face/Off
- Mission:
Impossible 2
|
"Broken
arrow," we are told, is the government term for a lost nuclear
missile. Freudians will know better. Broken Arrow, the
new let's-see-what-we-can-blow-up-next action romp, is loaded
with enough phallic symbols (missiles, guns, knives, trains)
to keep Quentin Tarantino happily theorizing for weeks. The bad
guy, cocky military pilot John Travolta (think Han Solo crossed
with Vincent Vega), steals not one but two thermonuclear missiles;
the good guy, heroic but untested Christian Slater (think nobody
in particular -- Slater's gun does his acting here), must outwit
Han Vega and recover the missiles. The movie is infatuated with
potency games and one-upmanship. Who's got the missile? John
Wayne Bobbitt could tell you what "broken arrow" really
means in this macho-showdown context.
Broken Arrow, like the recent From
Dusk Till Dawn, is so unapologetically what it is --
lowbrow crapola -- that you either roll with it or roll your
eyes at it. If only the script, indifferently sketched in by
Graham Yost (Speed),
didn't make eye-rolling so easy. This writer seems taken with
hurtling vehicles and young heroes challenging older psychos
(as Keanu Reeves did with Dennis Hopper) -- he must have seen
Strangers on a Train as a kid and never gotten over it.
Yost's scripts are skeletons onto which gifted directors (Speed's
Jan de Bont, and, in this case, the legendary John Woo) can graft
meaty action sequences. But those hoping for witty dialogue,
due to the presence of Tarantino alumni Travolta and Slater,
are in for a dry evening. Yost can't get enough of lines like
"We gotta get outta here!" and "We don't have
time to discuss it!" (Quentin would have given them plenty
of time.)
While Travolta calmly executes anyone who threatens his plan
("I don't see what the big deal is," he muses after
making his first close-range kill), Slater tracks him across
the desert with the help of brave park ranger Samantha Mathis.
Though stuck in a Sandra Bullock clone role, Mathis transcends
the thousand annoying "What's going on?" lines that
mar her first half hour. Slater apparently doesn't have time
to have a personality in this movie, but Mathis has enough for
both of them. She's not impressed by the boys with big guns.
Two other guided missiles give Broken Arrow semi-nuclear
capability. Behind the camera: John Woo, the Hong Kong master
of crescendo cinema, whose movies (The Killer, Hard
Boiled, and this one) elevate gunplay and explosions to concussive
ballet. On the screen: John Travolta, whose recent tough-guy
performances (Pulp
Fiction, Get Shorty, and certainly this one) make
smug aggression seem like a state of grace. They both have elegant
moves, and they turn this mosh pit of a script into an intricate,
rather beautiful dance of momentum and force. Broken Arrow
is good trash; to be great trash, it needs a screenwriter who
knows it's trash and proceeds from there. |
