Metacritic reviews

Cage is superb as a hollowed-out, ferocious man of action chasing his demons recklessly with machine gun firing away.

Well matched both to the material and each other, Cage and Beach capture Windtalkers' true struggle, the fight to hold on to values like honor, friendship, and tenderness in an environment that demands otherwise. This is as much a Woo trademark as the carefully orchestrated gunplay.

Woo's antiwar intentions and his talent are at odds. In Windtalkers, war is a beautiful hell.

The over-the-top sincerity that is so rewarding in "Face/Off" (1998), Woo's best American film, feels too clichéd in this more conventional context.

Not all it might have been, an oddly old-fashioned film from a director who's usually anything but.

We can only view Windtalkers with the same shaken detachment that characterizes Mr. Cage's Joe Enders, wishing that the codetalkers' real story, a little known and fascinating chunk of American history, had been given its true dramatic import.

Despite some feints in a soulful direction, the picture has none of the interior quality of a multifaceted war film like Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line." Woo is all about elegant surfaces, not inner conflicts.

For all this potential, and the appealing presence of Nicolas Cage and newcomer Adam Beach, Windtalkers remains almost obstinately flat.

Woo could end up becoming the John Ford of schmaltz.

This is a great subject for a movie, but Hollywood has squandered the opportunity, using it as a prop for warmed-over melodrama and the kind of choreographed mayhem that director John Woo has built his career on.