An average movie

When the word came out that John Woo was coming to Hollywood to expand his career, many of us got pretty excited. Indeed, at that time, Woo was probably the most heralded director coming from Hong Kong and to have his kinetic directing style combined with a massive budget for a wide audience was a nice prospect. Eventually, the end-result was not that impressive. I mean, his Hollywood début ‘Hard Target’ was not bad, one of the very few watchable movies starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, and ‘Face/Off’ was really cool but it was probably his only Hollywood movie which was really successful (on the other hand, ‘ Mission: Impossible II’ which always had a bad reputation was actually the highest grossing movie released in 2000). Anyway, this movie is probably the most disappointing one he has made in this period. The worst thing is that the story was actually really intriguing and it was a great idea to make a WWII feature focusing on those Indian code makers. But that’s what went wrong here, somehow, they didn’t focus on them at all and the Indian guy became just merely a sidekick to the typical white hero portrayed by Nicolas Cage. From this point, even though the whole thing was not that bad visually speaking, the story felt like a huge travesty. Of course, as usual, you could blame Nicolas Cage but I think he did what he could with this material. To conclude, even though the whole thing had some potential, it turned out to be one of the most disappointing WWII feature I have seen and it is not really worth a look.

5/10