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
Positive:
14
Mixed:
19
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
60
Film ThreatDavid 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
50
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.
50
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
Not all it might have been, an oddly old-fashioned film from a director who's usually anything but. Read full review
50
The New York TimesA.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
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick 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
50
Washington PostDesson Thomson
For all this potential, and the appealing presence of Nicolas Cage and newcomer Adam Beach, Windtalkers remains almost obstinately flat. Read full review
50
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
50
New York Daily NewsJack 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.
50
Charlotte ObserverLawrence 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
50
New York PostLou Lumenick
Gets pinned down in a barrage of schmaltz, cliché, stereotype and racial condescension - not to mention a historically dubious premise. Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger 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
50
Rolling StonePeter Travers
The code talkers deserved better than a hollow tribute. Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)Peter Rainer
Cage is the only reason to check out an otherwise mediocre movie. Read full review
50
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
The script is riddled with so many clichés, you count on the battle scenes to wake you from your stupor. Read full review
40
SlateDavid Edelstein
Woo could end up becoming the John Ford of schmaltz. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleMarc 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
40
VarietyRobert Koehler
A powerful premise turned into a stubbornly flat, derivative war movie. Read full review
40
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
At once chintzy and grandiose, awash in battlefield sentimentality and platoon clichés. Read full review
40
L.A. WeeklyElla 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
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