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.

"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.

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

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.

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.