Broken Arrow

365 Films

Entry #53

Broken Arrow (1996)

Directed by John Woo

Let me get one thing straight, I am by no means implying that Broken Arrow is John Woo’s best film.  It’s not even a very good film, largely devoid of the kind of personal thematic obsessions that run rampant in his Hong Kong filmmaking.  It’s an hour and forty-eight minute long live action cartoon blatantly ignoring any due diligence to the rules of logic or physics.  I’m sure there is a sub section of those reading this blog who would string me up just for the thought of putting Broken Arrow on here before Hard Boiled.  The best I can offer is I had never heard of director John Woo before this film and if it weren’t for the dedicated efforts of the HBO First Look team, I probably never would have.  The promotional material for the film, its trailers and whatnot did their best to hide Woo’s name but any blossoming cinephile could sniff it out on HBO or in the pages of Entertainment Weekly.  The making of showed clips from his earlier films where a man leapt into the air in slow motion while firing a shotgun at a motorcycle that caught fire and exploded from the impact.  It was like someone had scooped out the contents of my brain and run it through a projector at twenty-four frames per second.  I knew that whatever this “John Woo” was selling, I ought to be buying.  This was also back in the halcyon days of John Travolta’s second career as an energized character actor/movie star.  Re-entering the scene with Pulp Fiction, he had an indispensible amount of cache and funneled that into some promising prospects (and some not so promising ones, White Man’s Burden comes to mind).  Add the cherry on top in the form of screenwriter Graham Yost, (now of the great Justified-fame then of Speed-fame) and all signs indicated that this film had the necessary ingredients to be an unqualified success.  The key to most successful action films is pacing and the ingenuity of the action set pieces.  Following the Speed blue print, Broken Arrow is another perpetual motion machine that seems to be hurtling towards its finale and never takes itself too seriously.  The motivations and directives are simple and to the point, while Woo wastes very little time with draggy scenes of exposition.  It doesn’t hurt that a completely bugged out Travolta very easily walks away with the entire picture.  Where the film really shines is in the action sequences that combine the Peckinpah-meets-Gene Kelly choreography favored by Woo with a bright primary color palette that seems reminiscent of early the Looney Tunes cartoons.  Think of Travolta as the Coyote and Christian Slater as the Road Runner only with the Road Runner pursuing the Coyote and the Coyote in possession of a handful of nuclear warheads.  Okay, maybe the analogy completely falls apart but the fact remains that Woo’s innate skill with action and visual poetry blast Broken Arrow out of the realm of direct to video time waster and into that of intoxicating spectacle.  For me, the film is best remembered as a gateway drug into the highly addictive cinematic universe of John Woo and for that I will be forever grateful.  As ridiculous as it may sound, Broken Arrow heavily influenced the way I viewed action films going forward.  I realized that they no longer needed to be relegated to the labels of “junk” or “trash”.  Surely those labels will continue to rightly apply, but in the meantime there will always be filmmakers like Woo who aspire to do more, who aspire to make beauty out of the chaos.