Name: Retro Film Review: Broken Arrow (1996)
Item: Broken Arrow
Rating: 40
Author: @drax

(source: tmdb.com)

John Woo is probably the best known among all non-Hollywood directors who became great new hope of 1990s American film industry. But he is also the best example of Hollywood destroying non-Hollywood talents by bribing them with large budgets at the expense of their creativity and artistic freedom. After being deified by Tarantino and his disciples, Woo spent the last ten or so years in Hollywood and slowly turned into just another action-movie hack, with some of his titles being as forgettable as some of his less known titles in Hong Kong. One of those forgettable movies is 1996 action thriller Broken Arrow.

Protagonists of this film are two USAF pilots - Major Vic Deakins (played by John Travolta) and Captain Hale (played by Christian Slater) - assigned to test super-secret B 3 bomber over deserts of Southwest US. Those two men are good friends and boxing partners, yet during one of those test flights they become mortal enemies. It turns out that Major Deakins, disgruntled with the lack of promotion and low pay, decided to betray his country and make some money in the process. He steals the plane and tries to kill his co-pilot Hale who saves himself by ejecting. Afterwards the bomber crashes, but Deakins and two nuclear warheads are missing. Hale tries to prevent his former comrade and his associates from transporting the stolen warheads and using them for blackmail. The only help he receives comes in the form of park ranger Terry Carmichael (played by Samantha Mathis).

Failure of John Woo's American debut in Hard Target is often attributed to the lack of creative freedom and not so fortunate choice of Jean-Claude Van Damme for the leading role. In case of Broken Arrow John Woo reportedly had more creative freedom and undoubtedly had much better cast. John Travolta obviously had lot of fun in playing villain, while Christian Slater enjoyed not only rather rare opportunity to play action hero but also another occasion to have some chemistry with Samantha Mathis, his acting partner in Pump Up the Volume. Slater and Mathis are very good in this film, despite the fact that the latter's character was obviously written into film only to give some gender variety in something that would otherwise be completely male film. All that acting talent is, however, wasted. The characters are one- dimensional and the dialogue is uninspired at best. To make things even worse, screenwriter Graham Yost tries to compensate lack of character exposition with the series of predictable action scenes. John Woo, on the other hand, tries to compensate drama and pathos of his earlier films with increased pyrotechnics, often at the expense of good taste and common sense. One of the example is the villains being equipped with two instead of one nuclear device - during the course of the film, one of those devices would go off, but that happens in the abandoned mine and doesn't have any impact on protagonists, environment or the plot. The sole purpose of the explosion was to remind the audience of the impact nuclear weapons can have, yet by making it harmless the whole subplot became redundant. And, apart from few short and bright moments, Broken Arrow can be viewed as redundant as a whole.

RATING: 4/10 (+)

(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on November 21st 2002)