CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale
POSSIBLY the greatest action director in the world, John Woo is relatively unknown in South Africa. The only one of his films to have played on the main circuit is Hard Target, his first US feature, with local boy Arnold Vosloo as a dinkum Afrikaans mercenary, and Jean-Claude Van Damme intent on stopping him from killing homeless people for a perverted ex-Vietnam syndicate. It wasn’t very good.
Too bad, because the Action Cinema in Gauteng, the Chiraz in Durban and Victory in East London, among others, have shown several of Woo’s Hong Kong-based films, which are infinitely superior; Concorde, in downtown Johannesburg, holds the rights to their distribution.
For now, audiences without the gumption to hunt out a local bughouse will have to make do with Woo’s second Hollywood feature, Broken Arrow, a rather silly comic-book fable which nevertheless displays the man’s brilliance as an action director.
“Broken arrow” is US military intelligence lingo for a lost nuclear device. In the story, written in a predictable way by Graham Yost (the creator of Speed), Vic Deakins (John Travolta) and Riley Hale (Christian Slater) are crack military pilots who are chosen to fly a top-secret B-3 Stealth bomber on a test run. But Deakins has teamed up with some baddies and steals two nuclear warheads, intent on holding the US government to ransom.
What follows is your basic cliffhanger extortion plot, riddled with holes — as in all American action films, the hero’s hair is never out of place and the crack shots always miss when there’s another 30 minutes to go.
But it’s the execution that this is about, and Woo is a master. He has a knack for choreographing fight scenes, and for camera movements that make the action seamlessly enthralling, even though it’s always incredibly over-the-top — even operatic.
His films share many themes: friendship, loyalty, honour, betrayal, even a healthy dose of homoeroticism. He weaves them together with a mix of sentiment, romance, soul-searching and hysterical, circus-like action sequences. At its best, Broken Arrow is no exception.
The problem with the movie is all-American. When a nuclear bomb is detonated under a copper mine, the effects are amazing, but hero Slater brushes aside the resulting radiation by pointing to a flock of butterflies flying happily above a lake. Give me a break! The tragedy for Woo is that US producers aren’t into complex characters — they’re into hardware, and in this movie nuclear weapons are just another fashion accessory.
Nevertheless, Broken Arrow is a marvellously entertaining piece of action bubblegum. Travolta is subdued but perfectly tongue-in-cheek and sinister as the villain who reminds his honchos: “Do you mind not shooting at the thermo-nuclear weapons?”, and Slater and cohort Samantha Mathis are ideal young romantic heroes. I’ve never been a fan of aeroplane or military action movies, but this is so exhilaratingly made, the result leaves you feeling hungry for a large mixed grill, or, even better, like phoning your local fleapit and pleading with them to show a Woo retrospective.
Concorde film distributors can reached on
(011) 337-5581