Critic Reviews
51
Metascore
Mixed or Average
positive
14(40%)
mixed
19(54%)
negative
2(6%)
Showing 35 Critic Reviews
90
Despite some of the sentimentality that is also Woo's stock-in-trade, I was moved and absorbed throughout.
88
It's the best new battle film since "Black Hawk Down," a movie it surpasses in sheer feeling and bravura style, if not in nightmarish panic and suspense.
83
Cage is superb as a hollowed-out, ferocious man of action chasing his demons recklessly with machine gun firing away.
80
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.
80
Windtalkers is the best of Woo's American movies, and the one with the sturdiest and most direct links to his earlier pictures.
70
Even though we can see it coming, this gruff, inarticulate, half-embarrassed love between men, arrived at after many setbacks, is one of the stories that action movies never tire of telling and that many of us, even though we may laugh it off the next day, still find moving. [17 & 24 June 2002, p. 176]
67
Imaginative and frequently thrilling, and the love-hate relationship of its protagonists is quite compelling; Woo is always at his best in portraying the complexities of male bonding under intense pressure and violence.
67
Windtalkers blows this way and that, but there's no mistaking the filmmaker in the tall grass, true to himself.
63
Woo's antiwar intentions and his talent are at odds. In Windtalkers, war is a beautiful hell.
63
Capably made and certainly impresses by carrying its length, but it doesn't expand 60 years of World War II screen literature by very much.
