| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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BROKEN ARROW
Rating: 
USA. 1995.
Director – John Woo, Screenplay – Graham Yost, Producers – Bill Badalato, Terence Chang & Mark Gordon, Photography – Peter Levy, Music – Hans Zimmer, Visual Effects Supervisor – Peter Crosman, B3 Visual Effects Sequence – The Chandler Group, Special Effects Supervisor – Richard Thompson, Special Effects Consultant – John Richardson, Production Design – Holger Gross. Production Company – 20th Century Fox/WCG Entertainment.
Cast:
John Travolta (Major Vic Deakins), Christian Slater (Captain Riley Hale), Samantha Mathis (Terry Carmichael), Bob Gunton (Pritchard), Delroy Lindo (Colonel Wilkins), Frank Whaley (Giles Prentice), Kurtwood Smith (White House Chief of Staff), Howie Long (Kelly), Jack Thompson (Joints Chiefs Chairman)
Plot: Air Force pilots Major Vic Deakins and Captain Riley Hale take a Stealth bomber up on a routine test flight. But then Deakins knocks Hale out and ejects the two nuclear weapons on board. Hale manages to bail out before Deakins crashes the plane. Deakins is really working for a group of organized criminals who want to steal the nuclear weapons. He fakes a call to base, saying that the weapons’ cores are exposed, making the whole area around the crash site radioactive, allowing them freedom to smuggle the warheads out. Hale joins forces with park ranger Terry Carmichael and sets out to stop Deakins as he makes plans to detonate one of the weapons in a civilized area unless they are paid a ransom.
Director John Woo became a cult figure in his native Hong Kong with crime thrillers like A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989), Once a Thief (1990) and Hard-Boiled (1991). What made John Woo such a refreshing talent over any Hollywood action movie counterpart was his extraordinarily kinetic, pyrotechnic action style, something that has since been endlessly copied by Western filmmakers. Unlike most of his Hollywood contemporaries, who seem determined to just keep heaping size upon size, adding bigger and bigger explosions and more spectacular stunts, Woo gets in there with an amazingly gritty kinesis and creates a pure ballet of slow-motion violence. Woo’s discovery in the West in the 1990s proved an opportunity for him to leave Hong Kong before the 1997 handover to China and he has since worked in the US mainstream.
Woo’s first Hollywood film, Hard Target (1993) with Jean-Claude Van Damme, showed signs of mainstream compromise and, while critically trashed, but was still a worthwhile film in the patented Woo style. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for Broken Arrow, which was Woo’s second Hollywood film. It appears that here Woo has been given the same mega-size budget that the likes of James Cameron, Renny Harlin et al regularly command – and promptly all he does is make the same sort of mindless action spectacle that is exactly what his Hong Kongese films weren’t. Broken Arrow is undeniably spectacular – there are amazing death-defying train and vehicle chases, wild fights and shootouts. Woo seems to have included a helicopter crash every few minutes. Sometimes the spectacular insistence of it all is wearying. And unfortunately Woo’s patented style has disappeared under the size of the production. There are occasional moments where patented Woo-isms pop up – one being the initial encounter between Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis, which involves a Mexican stand-off using a gun and a knife, but here the feeling is more like the patented Woo-ism has slipped into self-parody.
Broken Arrow also stars John Travolta. At the time John Travolta was riding in the midst of one of the rare opportunities of the acting profession – a second lease of stardom, granted to him after the smash acclaim of Pulp Fiction (1994). Pulp Fiction allowed Travolta to forever shuck teenybop roles and instead typecast him as a sort of chic intellectual gangster. It also allowed Travolta the opportunity to prove he really could act. Alas here his villainy is played with a series of mannerisms that have a theatrical obviousness that verge on the campy. Travolta is all posturing psychotic villainy ready to explode at hair-trigger notice. The silliness of his performance though is somewhat eclipsed by Jack Thompson’s brief but truly horrendous turn as a stars‘n’striper general.
Broken Arrow features a script from Graham Yost who previously wrote the ‘runaway’ hit Speed (1994) and would go onto write Hard Rain (1998), Mission to Mars (2000) and write/produce the From the Earth to the Moon (1997) tv series about the Apollo space program. Broken Arrow is not as brainless a film as Speed was – it never quite escalates to the level of Speed’s ridiculously impossible happenings. It does feature what appears to be a central facet of Graham Yost’s work – the male and female leads who are thrown together in the midst of action and survive utterly improbable odds to the end.
John Woo’s subsequent films were Face/Off (1997) and Mission: Impossible II (2000), both of which are of genre interest, the non-genre war film Windtalkers (2002) and the Philip K. Dick adaptation Paycheck (2003). Woo has also produced the anime Appleseed Ex Machina (2007).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1996
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