John Woo's Second World War shoot-'em-up. The premise of the film, in contrast to that of any previous John Woo you will have seen (Mission: Impossible II, Face/Off, Broken Arrow, etc.), brings to bear what we could call a pressure of reality, to push against the director's cartoony tendencies, and to produce what we might like to hope would be a fruitful creative tension. Not just the reality of World War II, more specifically the Pacific campaigns on the Solomons and Saipan, but also the interesting and unexplored phenomenon of the Navajo "code talkers," whose language proved impenetrable to the Japanese. Woo, however, is not really interested in cryptography. His principal interest, apart from his customary bang-bang, is in the by-the-numbers male bonding between two Navajo code talkers (already bonded at the outset) and their individually assigned bodyguards, whose mission is, at all costs, to protect the code and not the talkers. (Get my meaning, mister? Sir, yes, sir.) An all-out war, of course, grants Woo his loosest license yet for his sustained sequences of high-energy chaos. And to some degree, the pressure of reality has served to woo Woo (beg pardon) away from all that fancy "balletic" stuff, even if a submachine gun is still apt to become momentarily a one-handed weapon. Admittedly this pressure hasn't curtailed his use of slow-motion. Nor has it thwarted that signature moment when two gunmen stick their muzzles in one another's faces and wait for the other to blink. And too often the director's assertive personal "style" comes down to jarringly overamplified sounds and oppressively overmagnified images. (Just when you think the close-ups can't get any bigger, you get one that can't fit both of the subject's eyes simultaneously on the wide screen.) The fervency of expression tends to look and sound a lot like desperation. Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Christian Slater, Mark Ruffalo, Frances O'Connor. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd