By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
February 09, 1996
Once upon a time, mostly during the 1980s, Hong Kong director John Woo made a series of balletically choreographed gangster flicks, including "The Killer" and "Hard-Boiled." His visual mastery in these kinetic, violent operas was indisputable.
But as "Broken Arrow"—John Woo's second American-made movie—shows, his talents have not traveled well. In fact, they haven't traveled at all. Thrown into a system that thrives on compromise, mediocrity and, uh, the English language, Woo (whose English is serviceable at best) has been effectively rendered into a hack.
In "Arrow," which is about as abysmal as abysmal gets, Stealth bomber pilots John Travolta and Christian Slater are zipping across the skies on a predawn exercise, carrying two nuclear missiles, when the trouble starts.
Travolta, we learn early, is in cahoots with the usual collection of rogues (including Fox TV football commentator Howie Long). After grappling with Slater, he forces the younger pilot to eject, then drops the missiles safely onto the desert floor for the bad guys to retrieve.
The rest of the movie involves Slater's bid to recapture and neutralize those weapons. He's assisted (in that action-bimbo kind of way) by park ranger Samantha Mathis, who acts so robotically, you wonder if she sleepwalked out of a Philip K. Dick story.
"I want to know what's going on, and I want to know right now!" she intones, like a ditsy replicant.
You can already tell this movie's in trouble in the opening scene, when Travolta and Slater trade unintentionally fake punches in a sparring match, and Travolta taunts his opponent about not having the will to win. The formulaic patter, word-processed by Graham Yost (who wrote "Speed"), is just the beginning of increasingly mundane "Top Gun"-speak between them. Later, in the bomber, Slater, expresses his thrill of flying: "Where else can you drive a $2 billion plane 800 miles an hour a hundred feet off the ground?"
In terms of Woo's old visual skills, there's less than a screen minute's worth: the gorgeous shot of a bomber, for instance, as it soars like a manta ray above the clouds; or a gasp-inducing moment when a crashing helicopter lands perilously close to Mathis, its rotary blades lacerating the ground around her. Unfortunately, this helicopter nose dive represents—all too symbolically—the state of Woo's filmmaking. Perhaps there's still time for him to turn that whirlybird around—or just bail out.
BROKEN ARROW (R) — Contains violence and profanity.
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