Know this: I am not an idiot.
Which is to say, what you are about to read is in no way meant to persuade, convince, or argue anyone that what I’m about to say is some kind of objective, universal truth.
It is the mere statement of a fact, the fact in question being this:
When it comes to John Woo’s American films, I think Broken Arrow is his greatest accomplishment, and I much prefer it to Face/Off.
And on the basis of this past February being the 30th anniversary of the film, it almost certainly falls to me to be its champion. For if not me, then who?
If you’re already reading this, it is probably insulting to have me V.N.-splain to you who John Woo is. But in the interest of inclusion: John Woo is widely considered to be one of the finest directors of action movies in the history of cinema, a name and a talent so potent that he both created his own local genre (heroic bloodshed) and fundamentally altered the language of action cinema in a way that his initial influences failed to do. The genre as a whole was fundamentally and irrevocably altered by what his work, and to this day we still more or less live in his shadow.
A skill set like this gets one noticed and eventually Woo was imported to America to ply his bloody, ballistic trade. His first outing was Hard Target, starring B-tier action hero (but we love him) Jean Claude Van Damme. His third film, widely considered to be the apex of his American output, is Face/Off, starring Nicolas Cage and John Travolta. And in between is the movie we are here to discuss, 1996’s Broken Arrow.
Riley Hale (Christian Slater) and Vic “Deak” Deakins (John Travolta) are Air Force pilots flying a stealth bomber armed with a pair of nuclear missiles for a vaguely discussed “secret exercise” over Utah. Unfortunately, Deak, cursed with the entrepeneurs’ mindset, has hatched a plan to fake a plane crash and abscond with the missiles in order to blackmail the U.S. Government. As one does. Hale, having survived Deak’s betrayal, sets himself in opposition to the plan, eventually joining forces with a park ranger (Samantha Morton’s Terry Carmichael).
It is a sturdy enough setup for thrills and chills, and the script by Graham Yost pretty much does what it needs to do. Not a world beater by any means, but suffice it to say the pieces are in place for a good enough time at the movies.
I would say they don’t make ‘em like that anymore, but… yeah, no shit, dude. I’m talking about a 30-year old movie here. What do you want, a cookie for recognizing that time has moved forward? It’s less about bringing anything back than it is that in a perverse way, our options feel more limited than ever before.
People trying to be Scott Adkins and mostly failing, John Wick-alikes, and the 87North Monopoly. This is the majority of our output, at least as far as U.S. efforts go. And as much as I tend to enjoy all of the above, after roughly a decade of little else, it’s hard not to yearn for something that feels a little
different. And when I get that urge, this is the sort of movie I’m always yearning for.
But, look, I said it up top: I’m not here to convince anyone that this is some underrated sleeper, or a cult classic in the making. Maybe I can make an argument that it’s a forgotten gem. But I ain’t gonna. No, all that’s happening here is that the passage of time has given me the excuse I need to talk about a film I really, really like. The kind that they don’t make anymore, which emerged right around the time that they stopped making them.
By the time Broken Arrow actually premiered, it was already a relic of a bygone age. For roughly a week previous to that, during the Super Bowl, there was a trailer for a little movie called Independence Day that was about to change everything.
Though, in truth, Independence Day was basically finishing the job that Steven Spielberg had started in 1993 when Jurassic Park pummeled Last Action Hero and became the hit film of that summer. As the nineties started winding down, the A-list action heroes were growing long in the tooth, and the B-Tier were proving to lack the longevity of their forebearers.
Casting Christian Slater and John Travolta in the sort of movie that Schwarzenegger used to pull off in his sleep was very much a sign of the time. By 1996, the age of the action hero was basically over; in a just few years time, technology will have progressed to the point where even Jerry freakin’ Maguire could do it.
It is into these fading days that Broken Arrow launches.
But the reason I wanted to write about it is actually very simple: I like action movies, and this is a movie that I think has extremely well directed action sequences.
There’s slightly more to it than that, I suppose. It’s not just the quality of the action sequences; it’s that they’re so well-executed, they gave me a better understanding of action filmmaking in general.
Action movies remain the ultimate ‘Turn Your Brain Off’ genre; anything can be forgiven, provided the stunts and the explosions are cool enough. We let it wash over us and, in return for the reptile brain pleasures, do them the honor of not asking too many questions.
And so, having been satiated thusly, for quite some time it never even occurred to me to ask why this particular movie proved so sticky when so many more original, better action movies simply didn’t.
Come to that: why did I prefer this to Face Off, which is by pretty much every metric (writing, acting, emotional resonance) a superior film? Or to Hard Target, which is a collaboration between John Woo and Sam Raimi that feels exactly like a collaboration between John Woo and Sam Raimi, and where only somewhere between two and three members of the cast seem aware of what movie is actually being made, and none of them are the lead actor?
It’s no surprise that Hollywood never really figured out what to do with Woo. It’s not as simple as separating his aesthetics from his themes, because the very thrust of his artistry resides in just how entangled those threads actually are. Studios wanted him for his “cool”; but the cool was never the whole of the story. Every moment of iconic cool was buttressed by men experiencing longing, torment, angst… you know, feelings. Those complicated, messy things that are essentially anathema to the American heroic ideal.
Heroic bloodshed is what they call it, but only because ‘melodrama with bullets doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. And in terms of his American efforts, Broken Arrow remains most interesting because it’s the one film of his where the melodrama finds almost no purchase.
Hard Target is a deeply fun movie, but is less an expression of John Woo’s thing than a bizarre platypus of a movie; you can feel producer Sam Raimi doing his best to tamp down his eccentricities in deference to Woo and shield him from the studio. He proves only semi-successful at both. But neither can quite manage to overcome the harsh reality that their star, Jean Claude Van Damme, is the weakest link in his own film. JCVD would eventually become a rather soulful and eccentric performer, but back in 1993 he was first and foremost a graceful, shockingly well-sculpted cocaine receptacle. And while we all owe him a great debt for spearheading the campaign to bring him stateside in the first place, his attempts to have Woo bless him with the iconography of cool don’t do anyone any favors. His massive ego and general stiffness makes enjoyment of the film about 15% more ironic than it ought to be. You’re laughing at it just a little bit more than you’re laughing with it, and in this particular case that makes all the difference.
Face/Off obviously does significantly better in this regard. No one can deny that it’s the only movie to successfully combine Woo’s sensibilities with the American Blockbuster Machine. But for all its undeniability, it’s still overly long, saves its worst action sequence for last with its basically anonymous boat chase finale, and… look, if you enjoy Hong Kong cinema, you’re going to have to learn to appreciate, or at bare minimum, tolerate, a certain degree of bathos. But we all have our limits, and the Somewhere Over The Rainbow shootout is mine.
(Side Note: While Face/Off may be the best merger between Woo and Hollywood, the purest expression of Woo in an American film is, in point of fact, Windtalkers. But y’all ain’t ready to hear about that yet)
Bathos is rather short order in Broken Arrow.
Indeed, there’s a very American sense of ‘It is what it is’ to the dynamic between Hale and Deakins. A Hong Kong version of this movie would include a lot of hand wringing and internal conflict over the sense of betrayal and the loss of friendship. But Hale approaches the situation with a sort of dutiful resignation: ‘Welp, looks like my buddy is a prick, guess I gotta take him out’. Still, you can see the contours of that dynamic (if not the commitment) in the punch-ups that bookend the film. Is there a certain perversity that a director famed for his ballistic carnage stages the exciting conclusion of his film as a simple fistfight that just happens to contain the only traces of his thematic passions in a vehicle that is otherwise almost completely alien to his usual territories? Some might say.
It takes a certain kind of actor to succeed in a John Woo film. To bring it back for a moment to Face/Off, the films success and popularity rest in no small part on the fact that the non-action scenes are just as riveting as the ones where things go boom because he has actors that are eager, some might say starving, to lean into the melodrama. I don’t think there’s any need, really to speak on the Nicolas Cage of it all; by now we are all the anti-Shaq, extraordinarily familiar with his game. But with thirty or so years of hindsight surrounding the brief second act of John Travolta’s career, it does feel safe to say that few directors managed to use him as well as John Woo. And I actually think it’s an underrated part of his skill set: his Vic Deakins, as well as his Castor Troy, are over-the-top in a way that could go very, very badly if not perfectly massaged. And for proof of that, we have… literally every bad guy Travolta has played since.
The case I will make to you is that John Woo, with his previously established gift for melodrama and tonal switching, has a handle on Travolta’s more outre instincts that American directors, allergic as they frequently are to big swings, don’t have the muscles to regulate.
Of course, Vic Deakins is not quite the character Castor Troy is… I mean, how could he be? But in Deakins, we can already see the delight with which Travolta tears into the dark side. This sort of freewheeling, wise cracking moustache twirler was nothing new at this point; we already had Wesley Snipes as Simon Phoenix, Armand Assante as Rico, Raul Julia as M. Bison… and all of them were pretty much just living in the shadow of Jack Nicholson’s Joker. But it’s a fine line between Hammy Fun and Hammy Annoying, and Travolta, as he is wont to do, dances upon that line with demented glee.
And Christian Slater, as our hero… is fine. He gives good down market Bruce Willis. Which, frankly, is all you need here: a lead that knows enough to not get in the way of the script.
The particular script that I read, a fourth draft, has some pretty significant differences from the final product while still maintaining the same essential shape and incidents. But having read it, it is undeniable that the film onscreen is objectively superior to the movie as it exists on that printed page. And in interesting ways, too. For one thing, there’s a helicopter based gag that occurred offscreen in the script (trust me, you’ll know it when you see it), as well as a few lame one liners that thankfully didn’t make the cut; the Hale-Carmichael dynamic is much improved by stripping down the occasional, fairly dire stabs at banter (to say nothing of Terry’s overtly goofy backstory), instead positing them as bonded more by their sense of professionalism and determination than by any (overt) sense of mutual attraction.
That Slater and Mathis can modulate their chemistry is perhaps not a surprise; it’s not their first time working together. And while it’s certainly amusing to think that John Woo was such a fan of Pump Up The Volume that he engineered a reunion, but this is almost certainly just… one of those things. Frankly, it’s just nice to see Samantha Mathis in this sort of thing, period; she’s worked steadily for decades now and turned in consistently good performances, but it seems like she’s never quite gotten the appreciation or the exposure she deserved. And she brings a unique energy to a role that was a lot more lightweight on the page.
So, then: all the pieces in place for a perfectly fun and acceptable time at the cinema. But we must again return to the original question: why, exactly, did this of all movies stick with me? Why would I be more excited to rewatch this than any of Woo’s other American movies of this era, nearly all of which are arguably superior?
I won’t say how long it took me to figure it all out, I will only say it took a while.
But the key that unlocked the whole thing came down to a very simple, arguably incorrect, edit.
I will be discreet here: to describe the scene in full would be to spoil one of the best gags in the movie, a stunt that (in my opinion) still holds up well even decades later. But suffice to say that there is a tense confrontation between two characters on a train. As the characters stare one another down, there is a brief cutaway to the outside of the train. It’s a shot that stuck with me, not because it’s some kind of cool or interesting image, but because of how weird it felt. Almost random. What was it doing there? And it wasn’t for many, many years that I finally understood what it was doing there.
It is there, as it turns out, for the simple task of establishing geography. So that when the gag happens, the viewer will subconsciously clock that it wasn’t just coming out of nowhere.
Now this was, strictly speaking, not necessary. The gag would still work without the setup; it’s still a very impressive stunt, after all. But I think it would be less effective. Without that cutaway, it would just be a thing that happened. But here again it comes down to the artistry of Woo: with one quick cutaway, it is subtly transformed from a shock gag to a payoff.
It was always a clunky edit, and understanding the reason for it didn’t necessarily fix that. There was no elegant way to convey the information he wanted to convey and so he chose an inelegant way, because “elegance” was less important to him that playing fair with the audience. Even when the majority of them wouldn’t actively notice or care.
But once I noticed this, it was impossible not to notice all the other choices he had made– the ones that most other directors might not have. And here I am writing myself into a corner a bit, because I don’t want to spoil those moments for a first-time viewer. Hell, in many respects the whole point of this article is that I didn’t notice them at first. A hundred invisible decisions to place the camera here instead of there. To cut on that particular action. To tell your actor to react to that moment just so.
The thing about watching a lot of action movies… is that you’ve watched a lot of action movies. Which means that I have seen a lot of movies that are not at all dissimilar to Broken Arrow. Which is exactly how I can say with authority that they’re rarely as well-done as this one is.
And that has been my go-to line for years now: I can imagine the version of this movie that was directed by someone other than John Woo, and it wouldn’t work nearly as well. But up until now, it didn’t actually occur to me to consider what the other options might have been, hypothetically speaking; when I conjure up this imaginary, inferior version of the film, whose feet would I be laying it at?
So I came up with a list of plausible options, who would have been making movies at that budget range at that time. Names like Stephen Hopkins. Peter Hyams. Geoff Murphy. Maybe Stuard Baird makes this as his directorial debut instead of Executive Decision.
(Interestingly, one name on my list, Dwight H. Little, has an executive producer credit on the film. Maybe there’s a story there… or maybe not)
There’s more. John Badham, maybe. Sheldon Lettich. Roger Donaldson.
Hell, while we’re at it, let’s throw in Wolfgang Peterson! Why not?
Now, if you’re so inclined, feel free to look up the filmographies of any, or even all, of those gentlemen. You will see some very fun, very entertaining movies. Maybe you’ve even seen and enjoyed some of them.
But if I had to guess, I would say that unless you’re a very specific strain of movie nerd, you had no idea who made them.
It was never going to be that way with a John Woo movie; not even one that only glancingly bears any of his trademarks. Because he was always more than just guns and two piece acrobatics. He was, and is, an artist.
Even when what he’s making isn’t exactly art.
That Broken Arrow isn’t, in the end, particularly great is kind of the point. It’s a decent script that would have made for a perfectly fine and entertaining film if pretty much anyone else had directed it. But would it be ‘write more than 3000 words about it 30 years after the fact’ good?
Thankfully, we’ll never know.
