Operation: Broken Arrow

John Travolta stars in this mindless thriller in which he steals a nuclear weapon and its up to Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis to save the world.. Overall a good action flick with a leave your brain at home plot..Travolta goes slightly over the top with his character but is still good..Slater is ok and Mathis does what she can with what little the script gives her.. on a scale of one to ten... 6

Like nearly every other in this genre BROKEN ARROW is dumb with a capital DUM . It suffers from a myriad of plot holes and factual errors that anyone who has surfed the net looking through sites dedicated to the military will be able to spot at once . One early example is when the pilots eject and control have no idea to their fate . It's a well known fact that pilot suits contain a homing beacon so pilots who eject on missions can be instantly traced

We as an audience are supposed to forgive this ignorance and this audience member found it very easy to . Yeah it's a Hollywood movie from the 1990s so we're treated to very unlikely plot twists in a movie where the good guy and an innocent woman just doing her job have to stop bad guys so get ready for firefights , explosions and the obligatory scene of a countdown

BROKEN ARROW might not be a classic action adventure movie ( It's a little too formuliac ) but it's better than most from the 1990s . Travolta purposely does an impression of Tom Cruise except he's a bad ass and Christian Slater may seem an unlikely action hero but he's far more convincing than Steven Seagal or even Keanu Reeves . John Woo directs in a workman like manner and though it's not his best movie Woo does treat us to some spectacular and grisly deaths

John Woo's continued attempt to translate his foreign success into Hollywood gold sees him take on bigger stars than Van Damme in Christian Slater and the resurrected star of Travolta. Slater and Travolta play pilots testing a new bomber, when one of them decides to steal the missiles on board the other must begin a personal fight to stop him.

As with Hard Target this is a solid enough action movie but it really could have been made by anyone, Woo's style only really comes through in a few scenes (the birds eye view of the opening boxing match, double handed gun play). This is a shame because the action scenes only occasionally get better than average.

The plot is weak and relies a lot on coincident and luck to keep things moving. This is quite insulting to an audience because it just shows that the script writers couldn't fix the plot as a workable story and decided to try and get this past. Travolta overplays the villain well, but perhaps overdoes the ticks and the madness a bit too much to be believable. Slater clearly wants to be like Keanu was in Speed but doesn't convince as an action hero, Mathis is cute but that doesn't make her performance good - she pretty much a non-entity and doesn't really have much chemistry with Slater.

Again a solid action movie that is OK for a Saturday night, but with the stars, the budget and a director of this calibre you can't help but feel this was a missed opportunity.

Frustrated by having spent years and years of being passed up for promotion, disgruntled and maniacal Air Force officer Travolta crash lands a US plane in the middle of the Utah desert where he and his cohorts plan to hold two nuclear warheads for ransom. The only ones who can stop him are his junior officer/co-pilot (Slater), who forms an unlikely team with a reluctant park ranger (Mathis), to try and thwart his diabolical scheme. Woo's one of a kind action scenes make the film worth watching, but they're outweighed by a mediocre script with too many improbabilities and excessive coincidences. Travolta's sinister villain is terribly overacted, and more laughable than menacing. **

"Broken Arrow" is a good action film about a Stealth pilot (John Travolta) who steals nuclear weapons one night during a practice mission. His goal is to sell the weapons back to the United States government by blackmailing them. Old partner Christian Slater is willing to stop Travolta at all costs with the help of ranger Samantha Mathis. Howie Long makes an impressive film debut as Travolta's evil henchman. The screenplay is smart enough to work and the direction is fast and furious. A film that is about as good as it can be. 4 stars out of 5.