What happens when you take a standard Hollywood $50 million action blockbuster, shallow script and all, and put it in the hands of a foreign moviemaker who’s spent much of his career brilliantly copying Hollywood action movies?
That’s the core question in “Broken Arrow,” a movie conceived by the mind that brought you “Speed” (writer Graham Yost) and directed by the master of over-the-top Hong Kong action extravaganzas, John Woo.
Strangely enough, the result is something of a standoff. Woo’s now-famous flair for gunfight choreography and bloody pyrotechnics, in Crown Colony sizzlers like “The Killer,” “A Better Tomorrow” (I and II) and “Hard-Boiled,” buoys the film. Yost’s sometimes funny but often senseless script pulls it down.
What tips the balance in “Broken Arrow’s” favor is a third presence: John Travolta. Travolta, obviously enjoying his post-“Pulp Fiction” renaissance as Mr. Movie Cool, plays this movie’s super-heavy, Vic Deakins, an embittered flier who organizes a scheme to swipe two warheads from the Stealth bomber he and buddy Riley Hale (Christian Slater) co-pilot. No matter how ridiculous the situation, Travolta keeps his cool. Obviously, he’s watched some action movies and noted that the villains get the best lines, the flashiest scenes. (When the producers initially offered Travolta Slater’s hero role, he turned it down.)
Flashy as his scenes are, though, Travolta and Slater have a steep mountain of baloney to climb. “Broken Arrow” takes its name not from the classic 1950 Delmer Daves western with Jimmy Stewart and Jeff Chandler, but from military slang for a missing nuclear warhead. And that’s what the movie is about: stolen nuclear bombs changing hands all around Utah.
When we first see crooked Deakins and straight-arrow Riley, they’re sparring in a boxing ring for a $20 bet — during which Deakins shellacs his pal while discussing Ali, Foreman and the “rope-a-dope.” Minutes later, the two climb aboard their plane. And, shortly after that, Deakins almost wastes Riley, forces him to parachute off, ejects the warheads over Monument Valley (without exploding them) and escapes before ramming the bomber into a mountain.
Fast enough for you? Yost and Woo are just getting started. They take us to the war room, where suits and muck-a-mucks babble on. They show us Deakins’ gang of Army vets (including Fox football analyst Howie Long) and his whining rich jerk of a backer (Bob Gunton). We see the love interest, Samantha Mathis as perky park ranger Terry Carmichael, who meets Riley during a tussle over her gun and his knife.
Pretty soon, the moviemakers are ramming helicopters into mountains, spraying machine-gun bullets hither and yon, staging wild jeep fights and dropping one warhead down a copper-mine shaft. Yost hasn’t taken any logic courses since he wrote “Speed”; continuity takes leave from this movie almost immediately. As Variety magazine mentions, at one point, Mathis hops off a boat, jumps on a truck and then mysteriously ends up near a bomb-laden train speeding to Denver. How? Why? What? Don’t ask.
Eventually, we get the piece de resistance: a battle over, under and through that speeding train, with the last warhead ticking away to doomsday.
You can’t say writer Yost doesn’t try, at least feebly, for variety. Instead of “Speed’s” bomb on a speeding bus and a plot to blackmail L.A., he has a bomb on a speeding train and a plot to blackmail America. Instead of fights on subway-car roofs, he has fights on freight-car roofs. Instead of explosions in elevator shafts, he has explosions in copper-mine shafts. And Slater and Mathis meet just as cute, say just as little and clinch just as hard as Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in “Speed.”
“Speed” was a huge hit. But was it really because of the script? (“Despite” is a better word.) Woo’s Hong Kong action movies, great as they are, can’t be described as credible portrayals of reality. In most of them, the heroes have gun battles where thousands of ammo rounds seem to be fired in minutes. But, in the hyper-emotional, half-delirious world of movies like “The Killer’ or “Bullet in the Head,” with their Peckinpah-like ballets of bloodshed, the excess fits.
This movie’s main problem, beyond the script, is that it isn’t excessive enough. It has great action sequences, but it lacks the lurid pop poetry of Woo’s Hong Kong stuff. There’s verbal humor — with Travolta the king of the zingers — and the camera keeps moving, the cuts keep coming. But the movie never explodes.
Still, the action really pops. And Travolta was really smart to play it bad this time, turn down the hero role. Why waste time jumping on jeep roofs, hanging on train undercarriages and shooting helicopters down with handguns when you can be a nasty, sexy guy like Deakins, a chilly killer who shoots his boss and then blows smoke in his face?
Most movie stars try to disguise their ego, but Travolta is unique in his willingness to flaunt narcissism. In his first period of super-stardom, with “Saturday Night Fever” and “Grease,” he played guys who loved to look in mirrors and strut. But while he seemed to go beyond vanity in “Pulp Fiction,” the narcissism flares up in self-loving Deakins.
Another problem with “Broken Arrow” is the bombs themselves. Have we seen so many movie explosions we’ve gotten blase? Here, the characters handle the warheads, load them on trucks and jeeps, stage gun battles over them, trigger and disarm them, drop them down mine shafts. Nobody actually juggles these bombs. But in the last scene, Travolta looks like he’s willing to try.
Where does Woo fit into all this? In action moviemaking, he really is one of the best there is — though you might not guess it from “Broken Arrow.” Somehow, Woo — who directed Jackie Chan in his early years, and helped revolutionize the contemporary Hong Kong crime thriller in the 1980s — has managed to disguise himself here as a big-time American action moviemaker, a super-Richard Donner. He keeps the movie moving, racing, roaring. But he has sacrificed some of the sheer delirious energy of his great Hong Kong films: the wild fights, the boiling emotions.
Woo is almost always better in an urban environment, a jungle, some terrain of lurid decay. Why put him in a desert? “Broken Arrow” is much better than the average big-time action movie, because Woo, unlike Donner or the others, has blazing style and a unique, even eccentric viewpoint. But the curse of American studio moviemaking is that it’s so big and inflated — and so much money is involved — that it can swallow you up, spit you out. That isn’t exactly what’s happened in “Broken Arrow.” But it’s no “Better Tomorrow.”
”BROKEN ARROW”
(star) (star) (star)
Directed by John Woo; written by Graham Yost; photographed by Peter Levy; edited by John Wright, Steve Mirkovich, Joe Hutshing; production designed by Holger Gross; music by Hans Zimmer; produced by Mark Gordon, Bill Badalato, Terence Chang. A Twentieth Century Fox release. Running time: 1:48. MPAA rating: R. Language, violence.
THE CAST
Vic Deakins………………John Travolta
Riley Hale…………….Christian Slater
Terry Carmichael………..Samantha Mathis
Colonel Max Wilkins………..Delroy Lindo
Pritchett…………………..Bob Gunton
Giles Prentice…………….Frank Whaley
