When Hong Kong action director John Woo made his first American movie, the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target, he had to recut and re-submit it to the ratings board 17 times in order to secure an R rating. Woo was probably surprised and baffled by the whole process, since Hard Target was downright languid by HK standards. But in the U.S., Woo's original cut looked radically violent, albeit strangely poetic. Even re-edited for Hollywood-style clarity and shorn of 20 minutes of footage, the released version of Hard Target is a severely flawed but oddly compelling piece of work.
On the bigger-budget Broken Arrow, one would suspect there might be even less room for Woo to indulge his old habits. In Woo's Hong Kong movies, outrageous set pieces and severe body counts are part of the territory, even though Woo himself takes a very moral high ground, insisting that the graphic violence is a metaphor for his characters' inner lives (the most violent of all Woo movies, Hard Boiled, is also the one that deals metaphorically with the upcoming social turbulence of the 1997 reunification of Hong Kong itself with mainland China).
In some ways, Broken Arrow is really two movies. One of them is Hollywood's movie: a blockbuster action picture with militaristic fetishes, digital special effects, a complicated terrorist storyline, and a couple of proven box office draws in the lead. The other one is John Woo's movie: a down-to-earth character study of two men who interact by trying to outsmart one another, and express their frustrations through gunfire and sucker punches. Accordingly, the film's biggest flaw is also its biggest asset. While Broken Arrow is too quirky to be a great Hollywood action picture, and too straightforward to be a great John Woo movie, it's fascinating to see the ways that Woo makes the most of what he's given.
What he's given, as anyone who's seen the ads knows, is the story of pilot Vic Deakins (John Travolta), who beats the crap out of his partner, Riley Hale (Christian Slater), in mid-flight and dumps their bomber's payload of two unarmed nuclear bombs into the Utah desert. Naturally, he demands payment from the government in exchange for not blowing up a city. As fast as you can say "Speed 2" or even "Die Hard 4," it's up to Hale and plucky park ranger Terry Carmichael (Samantha Mathis, who co-starred with Slater in Pump Up the Volume) to outsmart Deakins and foil his plans.
Does this sound OK? Well, the script is a big, lumbering catastrophe. It's written by Speed's screenwriter, Graham Yost, and it's every bit as outlandish as that film, but has none of the novelty. For starters, the protracted sense of cause-and-effect that's crucial to a taut thriller is entirely missing in this plot, where there seems to be no logical explanation for anything that happens. It takes forever for the movie to get into gear, partly because the audience is made to lumber alongside the military types back at Mission Control as they spend two reels figuring out, duh, that Something's Not Right.
The dialogue is even worse than the story. Slater is earnest and appealing, and Mathis couldn't be much more charming, but the lines they're given to spout at each other are mainly of the "Omigosh!" variety. (Was Woo perhaps unaware of exactly how trite this would sound?) Even so, Travolta milks this meager material brilliantly and closes right in on his own character, perhaps sensing an easy kill -- he nets the performance of his career, and probably saves the film. His psychopath isn't particularly frightening, but he is funny and charismatic -- unusual for a mad bomber. And he's the cold, cool center of what may be the film's best scene, a sadistic seduction episode having to do with Mathis's essential vulnerability, Travolta's considerable sexual magnetism, and impending cataclysm.
Travolta aside, Woo is the main attraction, and I've got to hand it to him -- I think our man comes through in the face of adversity. He cuts straight to the quick, emphasizing the rivalry between Hale and Deakins in a mesmerizing boxing sequence that opens the film. (Typical Woo -- a $20 wager placed on that fight becomes a symbol for the detached oneupsmanship that drives their relationship during the rest of the movie). And it's a rare comic-book action flick that has so many moments approaching the sublime.
They look like this: Hale wakes up from a night spent crumpled and bloody on the desert floor as his unfurled parachute, caught by the wind, tugs him gently across the ground. Or this: as soon as one of his cohorts ventures that the sonofabitch might be dead after all, jump cut to Travolta-as-Deakins rising suddenly out of the landscape in slo-mo close-up. Or even this: dazzled by a swarm of butterflies, Hale explains to his still-unnamed companion that if you see such delicate creatures in the aftermath of a nuclear detonation, it's a sign that you won't die of radiation poisoning.
Such moments (and others equally Woovian, like Slater suspended in mid-air, pumping heat at Travolta out of both fists) ensure that Broken Arrow actually gets better as it goes along. Critics have suggested that Woo lacks basic storytelling skills, yet his meaning is clearest when he's not relying on fancy special effects to carry the show (I lost count of exactly how many tiresome helicopter crashes we see, but I'll bet every one of them is digitally enhanced). Even so, it's understandable if American action fans are wondering why this director gets so much good press. Woo surely has a great Hollywood movie in him, but after Hard Target and Broken Arrow, I'm still waiting to see it.