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It Came From Netflix Streaming
Written By: Bill Brock
I first became aware of John Woo while
flipping channels and seeing something called Hard Boiled on Cinemax
at 2 in the morning. I’d imagine that, it being Cinemax and 2am, I
thought it might be an Andy Sidaris movie but instead, when tuning
in, it was the start of the hospital sequence and it simply blew my
mind. American action was pretty goddamned stale in 1993 when I
would have seen this. It was all Die Hard knockoffs and the last
vestiges of the ridiculous Chuck Norris heading into Nam to rescue a
couple more MIAs that the Vietnamese were apparently keen on keeping
twenty years later movies. But here was an action sequence that
didn’t offer much chance to catch my breath for about 40 minutes or
so. There were heroics, a sense that characters had developed,
something of an emotional core and just a visual coolness. It’s
hard to get across how exciting it was because if you were born after
a certain year, then nearly every American action movie you’ve seen
had aped (read: stolen) the style of Hong Kong action movies. So
anyway Hollywood dragged Woo over here and put him to work
replicating his style in a JCVD movie which really was a greatest
hits sort of thing and became the best JCVD movie ever (faint praise
I know). Eventually, Woo’s Hollywood involvement lead up to our
Slaterocalypse movie—Broken Arrow.
Broken Arrow is a Die Hard Knock off
that, instead of taking place in a skyscraper, takes place in
Southern Utah. Our movie opens with Travolta and Slater boxing.
Slater isn’t very good at it and Travolta beats him up while giving
information that will come in handy later in the movie. They are
both pilots of a Stealth bomber and are about to head out for an
exercise. During the flight we get some awkward exposition where it
is explained that Travolta is far too in your face and keeps getting
passed over for promotion. I guess he’s bitter about it even
though it doesn’t seem to have much to do with his motivations.
Travolta and Slater have a gun fight in the cockpit and somehow miss
shooting one another and the windows but they are pilots so I doubt
their gun skills are terribly important. Travolta ejects Slater and
some nukes and the movie plot finally gets going.
Slater is found by cute park ranger
Samantha Mathis and we get a Pump Up the Volume reunion. Sadly, we
aren’t reunited with her breasts but this isn’t an 80s Joel
Silver movie so…yeah. She distrusts him a bit and we get some John
Woo gun pointing but soon they decide to work together.
Travolta, in the meantime, has bailed
out and hooked up with his lackeys. We’ve got evil warden from
Shawshank as the whiny bitch money man, Howie Long who punched fire
in its mother fucking face in that firefighter movie he did, and some
other guys who don’t have long for this world. Their plan is to
demand money from the government in exchange for not, initially,
blowing up Salt Lake City. I’m sure the government would consider
it an acceptable loss and not pay because, seriously Mormons stop
knocking on our goddamned door. So instead they threaten Denver on
the off chance someone gives a shit about the Broncos. In all of
these movies the bad guys come up with the most absurdly complicated
plans with a 1 in a billion chance of actually working. Had Travolta
flown his stealth aircraft-that can’t be tracked well by
radar-somewhere and landed it then made a call to the government
saying, “Hey! I’m gonna fire missiles if you don’t give me a
kajillion dollars” then the plan would’ve worked and he’d be in
a non-extradition country enjoying his money.
Anyways, in the Slater part of the
movie, he’s killing lackeys and staying barely ahead of Travolta’s
plan and even works out that Denver thing based on that boxing match
conversation at the beginning. So thanks for the heads up, bad guy.
Here’s the other issue. Slater, who can’t box, can’t shoot and
is apparently a pushover all of a sudden goes buck wild and starts
leaping onto Humvees, out running Humvees, shooting a gun with expert
precision and just generally becomes a badass with Mathis, a park
ranger, keeping up step for step. I’m not expecting realism in my
dumb action movies but meet me halfway here, movie.
Anyway we get some business in a mine
with a nuke going off but we are reassured that since it was
underground it is nothing to worry about even though Slater and
Mathis escape via underground river which may be someone’s water
supply and we end up on a train. We get more fighting and jumping
and what not. Travolta, figuring the plan is fucked anyways, decides
to set the bomb off early. More fighting, “ironic” death by
warhead and the good guys win. Hooray.
The major problem with the movie is the
Travolta/Slater dynamic. In the incredibly stupid (but entertaining)
Face/Off, Travolta’s big dumb performance is matched by Nicolas
Cage’s big dumb performance. Here Travolta’s big dumb
performance overwhelms because Slater is playing it relatively
straight. Plus it really is just a silly movie that feels a hell of
a lot like The Rock.
Should you watch this? Sure, there are
worse ways to blow 2 hours.
Bill Brock used to do 'It Came From Netflix Streaming' over at Bobby Canipe's (Director of the upcoming American Indie flick, Bloody Bones) old 'Horrorstuff!' page, and I want to thank him for resurrecting it from the grave for a special edition of Slaterocalypse! Thanks again, Bill!
