Broken Arrow

Who doesn’t love themselves some John Woo?  Hard Boiled and Face/Off make me feel alive.  All of that jumping in mid air while shooting two guns at the same time is not only beautiful but also poetic.  There have been only a few directors with such a resume.  The thing is that Woo has made so many great films that it’s inevitable that some get lost in the shuffle.  And Broken Arrow seems to be one of them.

So an Air Force major hijacks two nuclear weapons and holds the U.S. hostage.  Well actually he’s going to sell them on the black market and just makes the American government think that he wants to negotiate but it’s still not a difficult plot to follow.  The bad guy is Deakins played by John Travolta (Saturday Night Fever, Pulp Fiction, Face/Off) and the good guy is Hale played by Christian Slater (The Wizard, True Romance).  These two are actually copilots out on a routine test run while carrying nuclear weapons.  The purpose of the trial run is to check the stealth technology aboard the plane and the stealth detection used by the military.  But Deakins uses this opportunity to evacuate the nukes and tries to kill Hale in the process but ends up ejecting himself and Hale out onto the Utah landscape.  So you have Hale trying to stop Deakins at every turn and Deakins trying to kill Hale whenever he shows up.  Great, simple, I love it. 

This came out in 1996 so John Travolta was “back”.  Pulp Fiction and not White Man’s Burden was the one to revive his career.  People forgot about him and didn’t realize he could be such a great over the top character.  So he’s a good choice for Deakins.  ‘Cause Deakins won’t let anything stand in his way.  He’s ruthless man.  He’s so evil that when the chance presents itself he ends up setting off one of the nukes, which he was planning on doing from the start anyway, just to show the world that he was serious about it (how funny is it when they show the radar room after the bomb goes off and everyone’s doing a really bad job pretending that they’re getting hit by an earthquake while Woo just moves the camera a little).  Hale even tells him that he’s “fucked in the head” which Deakins reacts interestingly to.  At first you can see that he doesn’t like it but then he shoots his gun and starts to laugh about it.  So he really is kinda crazy.  You can tell by the way he smokes his cigarettes.  I don’t know if they were trying to make it a trademark or a quirk or something but it’s amusing to see every time.  It’s like he’s smoking them in slow motion.

Hale is supposed to be the same kind of character as Deakins but he has a conscience that tells him not to commit treason.  Deakins even tells Hale that he considered bringing him in on the evil plot but thought he wouldn’t have the balls to go through with it.  In fact it’s Hale that starts the timer on one of the nuclear bombs but it was Deakins that lessened the time and smashed the controls to make it irreversible.  So they really are two sides of the same coin and I think it works pretty well even if it may not be that obvious while you’re watching.  Deakins created this situation and even though it was sorta thrust upon Hale he feels that it’s his duty to stop him personally.  But he’s not totally the same ‘cause he doesn’t smoke cigarettes in some weird John Travolta way.

There’s also a park ranger/love interest played by Samantha Mathis (Super Mario Bros., American Psycho) who tags along with Hale.  She may be annoying in this film but she helps him out a lot.  She helps him take down a helicopter, drive a getaway car, escape a mine with a nuclear weapon in it and so on.  The problem is I just don’t believe for a second that she’s tough.  But I was reading that Halle Berry and Jennifer Aniston were up for this role.  Actually Berry probably would have been pretty alright but Aniston would have been dreadful.  Either way Mathis was probably the best choice.

And I thought that Howie Long made his film debut in this thing but apparently according to IMDB he was in some other movie in 1986 and also did one episode of a TV show in 1988.  Upon further research I found out that Long was initially in That Thing You Do! as Mr. White’s (Tom Hanks) friend or partner or something but was cut from the theatrical release and is on the DVD (I’ll review that movie later).  That movie also came out in 1996 so I guess this is…just another picture that Howie Long is in.  But he was actually trying to get his career as an action star rolling with this film.  It’s impressive (or not depending on how you view professional athletes getting a lead in an action movie) that he would star in his very next film, Firestorm.  It’s not great but not bad either.  The best part might be William Forsythe (Out for Justice, Stone Cold) as the bad guy.  But in this movie Long is Deakins’ right hand man and does a good job playing it straight.  I like the way these two look together and the way they act towards each other.  Long’s character, Kelly, seems to admire Deakins a bit and acts like his bodyguard.  Deakins kills a couple of his own men but leaves Kelly alone.  Long as the muscleman brute and Travolta as the crazy brains of the operation works well.

I also have to mention that Delroy Lindo (Ransom, Gone in Sixty Seconds) has a part in this.  I love seeing him in whatever he does but he’s never in any good movies, except maybe Malcolm X.  He plays one of the military guys that was tracking the plane during the test run and then helps to track down Deakins.  Lindo has such a great voice and delivery.

So this film has typical John Woo action all over it.  The shootout in the mine is great and has some particular Woo characteristics like shooting with two guns in each hand and slow motion diving ‘n shit.  There’s also the typical good guy, bad guy chat through a wall or in this case caved in rocks.  This is when Hale calls Deakins “fucked in the head”.  The train scene at the end is great too.  I really like how much they actually use the entire train and that not all of the action is inside the cars.  Unfortunately there’s no “holy shit” classic scene in this piece.  It’s all good and the pacing is fine but there’s nothing mind blowing.  It’s satisfying and solid but it doesn’t have you asking yourself why you don’t watch this one more often.

Just to touch on something briefly, remember the famous line from this movie?  When Deakins sets off the nuke it takes down a helicopter and then he exclaims, “I said goddamn what a rush!”  I always thought that this was a callback to another Travolta picture, Pulp Fiction.  Uma Thurman’s character in that film, Mia, takes a big hit of coke in the bathroom of Jack Rabbit Slims and says, “I said goddamn.  Goddamn.  Goddamn.”  Now this, according to the script, is supposed to be an imitation in itself of the Steppenwolf song “The Pusher”.  So if Travolta really was imitating Uma Thurman then that’s really interesting and a cool reference.  If not it’s still a fucking cool line to say after a helicopter has been blown to shit.

I dunno man I think Broken Arrow is fucking good.  It’s a little better than Hard Target and leagues beyond Mission: Impossible II: Mission Impossibler and fucking Windtalkers.  It’s almost like an alternate version of Face/Off, like this was the warm up for Woo before really getting down to business.  But I think if he hadn’t up the ante with Face/Off or if it was never made then we’d all be talking about this one a lot more.  It would be his great American film.  I also think this looks especially good now because after Face/Off he never made something quite like that or this again.