Windtalkers Critic Reviews

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 the full review

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

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 the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review

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