Windtalkers

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Distributing Corporation (MGM) | Release Date: June 14, 2002

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

51	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 35 Critic Reviews

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Critic Reviews

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Jonathan Rosenbaum

Despite some of the sentimentality that is also Woo's stock-in-trade, I was moved and absorbed throughout. Read full review

Michael Wilmington

It's the best new battle film since "Black Hawk Down," a movie it surpasses in sheer feeling and bravura style, if not in nightmarish panic and suspense. Read full review

Shawn Levy

Cage is superb as a hollowed-out, ferocious man of action chasing his demons recklessly with machine gun firing away. Read full review

Keith Phipps

Well matched both to the material and each other, Cage and Beach capture Windtalkers' true struggle, the fight to hold on to values like honor, friendship, and tenderness in an environment that demands otherwise. This is as much a Woo trademark as the carefully orchestrated gunplay. Read full review

Stephanie Zacharek

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

David Denby

Even though we can see it coming, this gruff, inarticulate, half-embarrassed love between men, arrived at after many setbacks, is one of the stories that action movies never tire of telling and that many of us, even though we may laugh it off the next day, still find moving. [17 & 24 June 2002, p. 176]

William Arnold

Imaginative and frequently thrilling, and the love-hate relationship of its protagonists is quite compelling; Woo is always at his best in portraying the complexities of male bonding under intense pressure and violence. Read full review

Lisa Schwarzbaum

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

Michael Sragow

Woo's antiwar intentions and his talent are at odds. In Windtalkers, war is a beautiful hell.

Mike Clark

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

James Berardinelli

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

Leighton Klein

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

Carrie Rickey

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

Rick Groen

Windtalkers is to movies what Paris is to weather -- if you don't like the show you're watching, just wait a minute and an entirely different picture will blow into view. Read full review

David Grove

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. Read full review

New Times (L.A.)Andy Klein

The over-the-top sincerity that is so rewarding in "Face/Off" (1998), Woo's best American film, feels too clichéd in this more conventional context.

Kenneth Turan

Not all it might have been, an oddly old-fashioned film from a director who's usually anything but. Read full review

A.O. Scott

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

Mick LaSalle

Despite some feints in a soulful direction, the picture has none of the interior quality of a multifaceted war film like Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line." Woo is all about elegant surfaces, not inner conflicts. Read full review

Desson Thomson

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

TV Guide MagazineKen Fox

The movie deals superficially with Native American pride and racism in the ranks, but it's hardly about the codetalkers at all: Neither Woo nor the screenwriting team of Joe Batteer and John Rice seem to appreciate the bitter irony in a Native American soldier protecting his land by serving the very government that took most of it from him in the first place. Read full review

Jack Mathews

The strength of Windtalkers is in its occasional, all-too-short respites from battle, when Enders is struggling with his demons and Yahzee is trying to understand his aloofness.

Lawrence Toppman

Know how to tell if a war movie is mediocre? An outspoken bigot, usually a Southerner, abuses a patient member of an oppressed minority -- the Asian recruit, the African American or, in the case of Windtalkers, a pair of Navajo men from Arizona in his platoon. Read full review

Lou Lumenick

Gets pinned down in a barrage of schmaltz, cliché, stereotype and racial condescension - not to mention a historically dubious premise. Read full review

Roger Ebert

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

Peter Travers

The code talkers deserved better than a hollow tribute. Read full review

Peter Rainer

Cage is the only reason to check out an otherwise mediocre movie. Read full review

Rene Rodriguez

The script is riddled with so many clichés, you count on the battle scenes to wake you from your stupor. Read full review

David Edelstein

Woo could end up becoming the John Ford of schmaltz. Read full review

Marc Savlov

Woo's mainstreaming his vision here, and though Windtalkers has its moments of precious, awful clarity, it can't hold a candle to the man's earlier blood-soaked balletics. Read full review

Robert Koehler

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

J. Hoberman

At once chintzy and grandiose, awash in battlefield sentimentality and platoon clichés. Read full review

Ella Taylor

In the studied excess of his Hong Kong action movies, Woo's swooning sentimentality plays like grand opera. With its dogged Hollywood naturalism and the inexorable passage of its characters toward sainthood, Windtalkers is nothing but a sticky-sweet soap. Read full review

David Sterritt

This is a great subject for a movie, but Hollywood has squandered the opportunity, using it as a prop for warmed-over melodrama and the kind of choreographed mayhem that director John Woo has built his career on. Read full review

Joe Morgenstern

The Navajos must have sent much more crucial messages at much higher levels during the war, but you'd never know it from this movie. Windtalkers is practically all action and no talk.