New This Week
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search

Upcoming Release Calendar
Awards & Bests By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

sort by name

sort by score

34 10,000 B.C.
37 Air I Breathe, The
52 Be Kind Rewind
47 Boarding Gate
46 Bonneville
42 Bucket List, The
70 Caramel
49 Cassandra's Dream
44 Chaos Theory
54 Charlie Bartlett
64 Chronicle of an Escape
63 City of Men
78 Control
66 Darfur Now
59 Definitely, Maybe
41 Drillbit Taylor
36 Eye, The
46 Finishing the Game
35 Flakes
38 Flash Point
57 Flawless
29 Fool's Gold
41 Funny Games
66 George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
65 Grace Is Gone
57 Hammer, The
68 Honeydripper
67 In Bruges
xx Jack and Jill vs. the World
35 Jumper
9 Meet the Spartans
52 My Blueberry Nights
48 National Treasure: Book of Secrets
50 Other Boleyn Girl, The
90 Persepolis
44 Rails & Ties
46 Rambo
36 Remember the Daze
47 Semi-Pro
24 Sex and Death 101
76 Shotgun Stories
63 Signal, The
62 Spiderwick Chronicles, The
12 Strange Wilderness
45 Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns
59 Under the Same Moon
40 Vantage Point
55 Walker, The
37 War, Inc.
46 Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins
60 What Would Jesus Buy?
51 Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
17 Witless Protection

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Windtalkers
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Distributing Corporation


4.9

based on 35 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 20 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

FILM:

MPAA RATING: R for pervasive graphic war violence, and for language

Starring Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Peter Stormare, Noah Emmerich, Mark Ruffalo, Frances O'Connor, and Christian Slater

In 1942, several hundred Navajo Americans were recruited as Marines and trained to use their language as code. In John Woo's Windtalkers, Marine Joe Enders (Cage) is assigned to protect Ben Yahzee (Beach) -- a Navajo Code Talker, the Marines' new secret weapon. (MGM)

GENRE(S):	War
WRITTEN BY:	John Rice Joe Batteer
DIRECTED BY:	John Woo
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: October 15, 2002 Video: October 15, 2002 Theatrical: June 14, 2002
RUNNING TIME:	134 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA
LANGUAGE(S):	English / Navajo (with English subtitles)

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Despite some of the sentimentality that is also Woo's stock-in-trade, I was moved and absorbed throughout.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

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.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

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

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

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.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Windtalkers is the best of Woo's American movies, and the one with the sturdiest and most direct links to his earlier pictures.

The New Yorker David Denby

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]

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Windtalkers blows this way and that, but there's no mistaking the filmmaker in the tall grass, true to himself.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

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.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

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

USA Today Mike Clark

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.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The result is that the film comes across as preachy and clichéd. And, while the battle sequences are well executed from a technical point-of-view, they often seem repetitive and uninspired.

Boston Globe Leighton Klein

The code talkers and their guardians - Beach and Cage, Willie and Slater - do the best they can with the oddly flat-footed script, but their dynamics don't really have a place in Woo's universe.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

While I don't always have the stomach for Woo's viscera or the heart for his pure, angelic heroes and impure, diabolical villains, I found myself responding to the context and subtext of Windtalkers while closing my eyes through what one might call its text. It's two-thirds of a great film.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Windtalkers is to movies what Paris is to weather -- if you don't like the show you're watching, just wait a minute and an entirely different picture will blow into view.

Film Threat David Grove

This is the kind of film where you think you can predict everything that’s going to happen upon the first shot and you spend the rest of the film praying that you’re wrong. But it’s fun getting there.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The Navajo code talkers have waited a long time to have their story told. Too bad it appears here merely as a gimmick in an action picture.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Gets pinned down in a barrage of schmaltz, cliché, stereotype and racial condescension - not to mention a historically dubious premise.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

The script is riddled with so many clichés, you count on the battle scenes to wake you from your stupor.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The code talkers deserved better than a hollow tribute.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Cage is the only reason to check out an otherwise mediocre movie.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

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

New Times (L.A.) Andy Klein

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.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

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.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

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

TV Guide Ken Fox

The movie deals superficially with Native American pride and racism in the ranks, but it's hardly about the codetalkers at all: Neither Woo nor the screenwriting team of Joe Batteer and John Rice seem to appreciate the bitter irony in a Native American soldier protecting his land by serving the very government that took most of it from him in the first place.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

The strength of Windtalkers is in its occasional, all-too-short respites from battle, when Enders is struggling with his demons and Yahzee is trying to understand his aloofness.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Know how to tell if a war movie is mediocre? An outspoken bigot, usually a Southerner, abuses a patient member of an oppressed minority -- the Asian recruit, the African American or, in the case of Windtalkers, a pair of Navajo men from Arizona in his platoon.

Variety Robert Koehler

A powerful premise turned into a stubbornly flat, derivative war movie.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Woo's mainstreaming his vision here, and though Windtalkers has its moments of precious, awful clarity, it can't hold a candle to the man's earlier blood-soaked balletics.

Slate David Edelstein

Woo could end up becoming the John Ford of schmaltz.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

In the studied excess of his Hong Kong action movies, Woo's swooning sentimentality plays like grand opera. With its dogged Hollywood naturalism and the inexorable passage of its characters toward sainthood, Windtalkers is nothing but a sticky-sweet soap.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

At once chintzy and grandiose, awash in battlefield sentimentality and platoon clichés.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

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.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The Navajos must have sent much more crucial messages at much higher levels during the war, but you'd never know it from this movie. Windtalkers is practically all action and no talk.

The average user rating for this movie is 4.9 (out of 10) based on 20 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Peter S. gave it a4:
Strange that a film with so much bloody carnage could be so unexciting.

KoR gave it a9:
I thought the special effects looked fine, a couple of the big shots with the planes flying over could have been from a computer game but they still look more realistic than some of the over-the-top effects seen in several big budget films. I thought the action was also filmed very well and gave a different sort of view of the action than from many other war films.

[Anonymous] gave it a7:
OK, so it doesn't tell us much about the Navajos. But it does, ironically, keep you pinned to the seat and create some fun action, even if it is too unrealstic from time to time.

Pat C. gave it a 3:
It continues to amaze me how Hollywood can take good non fiction and turn it into bad fiction.

Yoon Min C. gave it a 5:
Woo's silly soap opera/blood ballet antics worked like a charm on a small scale in such cult classics as Better Tomorrow. Here in inflated, epic form it's like using a condom to fit a whale. There are some bruising moments on the subject of racial prejudice, and the actors generally do nicely but the enemies here are crazy 'Japs' of WWII propaganda, and the special effects look fake; worse, they aren't even necessary. Woo claims to be a Christian but his idea of Jesus must be some dude wearing sunglasses and packing two semi-automatics.

Josh B. gave it an 8:
Very well made special effects, good storyline also!

Jere D. gave it a 1:
The only windtalking is in the title. A wonderful tale of WWII is given short shrift. Cage is wooden. The cliches are too numerous. The battle scenes bear little relationship to real war. Skip this and re-watch Pvt.Ryan.

Windtalkers Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Distributing Corporation

Windtalkers
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Distributing Corporation