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

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.

In his "TV Movies and Video Guide," Leonard Maltin asks, "Why was this movie made?" The answer is simple: To entertain the people. I was certainly entertained by this far-fetched action thriller, due in no small part to John Woo's imaginative direction of the action sequences. John Travolta overdoes the psycho routine, hamming it up when some restraint would have made for a more believable performance, but his considerable charm sees him through. Christian Slater, an actor who hasn't impressed me as anything more than a Jack Nicholson wannabe, makes a surprisingly commendable hero. This movie is junk food, of course, but it's very tasty indeed.

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. **