Windtalkers

Windtalkers is the best of Woo's American movies, and the one with the sturdiest and most direct links to his earlier pictures.Read Full Review »

Windtalkers blows this way and that, but there's no mistaking the filmmaker in the tall grass, true to himself.Read Full Review »

While I don't always have the stomach for Woo's viscera or the heart for his pure, angelic heroes and impure, diabolical villains, I found myself responding to the context and subtext of Windtalkers while closing my eyes through what one might call its text. It's two-thirds of a great film.Read Full Review »

Capably made and certainly impresses by carrying its length, but it doesn't expand 60 years of World War II screen literature by very much.Read Full Review »

The result is that the film comes across as preachy and clichéd. And, while the battle sequences are well executed from a technical point-of-view, they often seem repetitive and uninspired.Read Full Review »

The code talkers and their guardians - Beach and Cage, Willie and Slater - do the best they can with the oddly flat-footed script, but their dynamics don't really have a place in Woo's universe.Read Full Review »

For all this potential, and the appealing presence of Nicolas Cage and newcomer Adam Beach, Windtalkers remains almost obstinately flat.Read Full Review »

The code talkers deserved better than a hollow tribute.Read Full Review »

The Navajo code talkers have waited a long time to have their story told. Too bad it appears here merely as a gimmick in an action picture.Read Full Review »

We can only view Windtalkers with the same shaken detachment that characterizes Mr. Cage's Joe Enders, wishing that the codetalkers' real story, a little known and fascinating chunk of American history, had been given its true dramatic import.Read Full Review »