Windtalkers: Critic Reviews

A merely competent action war pic, boasting neither Woo's trademark balletic violent set-pieces nor any convincing insight into the tensions between the native Americans and their Anglo-Saxon commanders in the Marine Corps.

It's the best new battle film since Black Hawk Down.

The history is fascinating; the action is dazzling. They just don't work in concert.

A powerful premise turned into a stubbornly flat, derivative war movie.

The energy and conviction of the action sequences don't quite compensate for Windtalkers' emotional cliches and historical heedlessness.

War film relies too much on relentless violence.

Replete with Cage's finest angsty acting and John Woo's requisite concerns of friendship and rivalry in the face of violence.

With Windtalkers, the glaring refutations of time, space and reality impress upon viewers the simple fact that Woo is at his best when he isn't attempting anything more significant than the most emptily satisfying explosion you're likely to enjoy - a scat

The screenwriters struggle to integrate the coded transmissions with the action, and the flamboyant set piece battles feel like so much empty rhetoric.

What we get is a surprisingly entertaining film, corny as it is at times, that could have suited John Wayne. [Published 5-13-02]

This is the kind of film where you think you can predict everything that's going to happen upon the first shot and you spend the rest of the film praying that you're wrong. But it's fun getting there.

I didn't expect a comedy.

Too celebratory of Woo's good guy-versus-bad guy, buddy-buddy ethos of action movies to rise above the limitations of the genre, and too obsessed with its own seriousness to be a truly 'serious' film.

A vast repository of hoary, honour-code cliches.

You'd probably be better off reading Catch 22 - even if it is for the fifth time . . .

A premissa e interessante, mas o terceiro ato do filme, quando Cage e Beach se tornam indestrutiveis, estraga o filme.

It's tough to get worked up after watching superior films like Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers."

Sure, he directs the heck out of gun battles and hand-to-hand combat, paying loving attention to each grunt, spurt and grimace, but there is something unseemly about the agony of war serving as fodder for yet another of Woo's sensational spectacles.

While some may have used this fascinating subject matter to craft a serious drama with historical significance, Woo and his writers choose instead to stay with the high-octane action format.

What should be a moving story with spectacular battle scenes by one of the world's greatest action directors is a huge let-down.

Here, [Woo] has to deal with visual chaos. And he doesn't do a good job of it.

...Windtalkers is one of the most exciting (not to mention violent) war movies to emerge in quite some time.

Inspired by true events, this war-is-hell action drama from John Woo is a failed epic that doesn't rise to meet the material that inspired it.

It comfortably emerges as the best of the recent war flicks.

This film should be declared a health hazard.