Nome in codice: Broken Arrow

Usually I'm the first person to label this sort of movie. Look at it. It's got the usual assortment of cliches and conventions. The John Woo directed action scenes stretch over the top. There's a mentally unstable talkative nemesis, a predictable betrayal and even one of those bombs that graces us with a digital readout. All prerequisites for movies of a certain quality and after saying all that - I'd usually be complaining about now.

Yet for one reason I can't. This movie really entertained me. It finds a way to come together in a really enjoyably manner and I'm happy with what I got. I can't bad mouth it. Nothing got in my way of everlasting enjoyment of seeing baddies die, bombs going off and the baritone guitar instrumental. It just all clicks from the get-go.

If your reading this you don't need me to recycle the plot summary. It's of a trivial nature. Good action, decent cast and a fun atmosphere go a long way with Travolta ultimately holding it all together. He plays his role to the hilt and delivers some fantastic lines. Him and Slater tango pretty well too. Travolta makes for a great bad guy and good action movies require great bad guys. Chances are anyone else in Broken Arrow and you'd be reading a completely different review. A guilty pleasure if there ever was one.

If you want an action film in which the hero has a personality, and the bad guy has an even better personality, take a look at Broken Arrow. John Woo's choreographed action is not as dramatic as the Matrix-clone films that are so common today. He is great at creating interesting relationships between heroes and villains, and this film is a good example.

John Travolta is terrific. Christian Slater breaks typecast by playing a nice, sane soldier doing his duty. The love interest isn't an idiotic supermodel playing a nuclear scientist or something, but a park ranger, also doing her duty. She is cute, earthy, and actually believable.

If you want a film that will repeat every aspect of every other military adventure film you have ever seen, you will be disappointed. If dialog bores you, skip this film. If you like action movies filmed entirely in parking garages and spooky allies, then you will not appreciate the settings in this film in America's majestic West.

Well. What can I say? This film is rather typical and has the same amount of violence as many other action-thrillers. (But perhaps a little more?) Despite this, it was very enjoyable and in my opinion deserves 6.5 stars-slightly more than it actually got. I never realized that Travolta was such a good "bad guy" actor and almost deserved an Oscar! But Christian Slater was just as good as the out and out good guy, along with Terry Carmichael as his side-kick. The ending was short but effective, because of the pleasing lack of sentimentality and sexism. Keep up the good films, because I certainly enjoyed this one.

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.

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