Windtalkers - Region 2 DVD

From an interesting historical footnote, Woo and his collaborators spin out an unlikely and repetitive platoon story, with an all-cliché bunch of grunts spitting out hardboiled dialogue between the noise and violence. The Woo touch is evident; from the astonishing pullback from a butterfly over bloodied waters to the thick of hand-to-hand fighting, but too many of the battle scenes are just more explosions-and-body-parts along the same lines of Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down.

On the DVD: Windtalkers contains an 11-minute TV filler making-of featurette; footage of the entire cast (except Cage) romping through the research process at Actors' Bootcamp; plus on-set diaries, i.e., B-roll footage of the crew working on four big action scenes. Of the two commentary tracks, the first offers a lot of mutual stroking with the occasional insight from Cage and Slater, the other offers Navajo actor Roger Willie and real-life codetalker/technical advisor Albert Smith. The language options, for soundtrack and subtitles, are English and (oddly) Czech. --Kim Newman