Windtalkers

The last time John Woo directed Nicolas Cage, it was in Face/Off, a hammy sci-fi shoot-em-up sandwiched between Cage’s throwaway turns in the clumsy flicks Con Air and City of Angels. Now the Hong Kong action specialist re-teams with his most vexing leading man for (of all things) a World War II flick—not the most immediately promising prospect after the flame-out of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor and the muted viewer response to Tom Hanks’ Band of Brothers miniseries. Embellishing on a few factual elements of the war in the Pacific, Windtalkers concerns the strained camaraderie between Native American soldiers and their white comrades, complicated by the use of the Navajo language to encode classified U.S. military secrets and an unsavory protocol for dealing with fluent speakers who are on the verge of Japanese capture. No matter how deeply Woo delves into the racial and emotional complexities of the (kinda true) story, we’ll assume that MGM hired him mostly for his expertise in the field of eye-popping movie combat. While it seems incongruous to imagine the slick melees of Mission: Impossible 2 transposed to suit the low-tech grunts of WWII, maybe less authentic battlefield action is just what multiplex regulars need, faced as they are with plenty of present-tense military realism by way of their daily papers and 24-hour newscasts.