John Woo’s ‘Broken Arrow’ marks 30 years of eye-narrowing

Christian Slater and John Travolta squared off in one of multiple nuclear-smuggling action movies from 1996.

(Note: Substack was being screwy on Wednesday morning, so my Wuthering Heights review may not have made it out to everyone. Here it is again.)

Broken Arrow, released in February of 1996 – 30 years ago this week — marked the second film in John Woo’s Hollywood sojourn, following Hard Target three years earlier. Written by future Justified showrunner Graham Yost, Broken Arrow had a premise that was very much in line with the action-adventure ethos of the mid-1990s.

Yes, there’s a high concept involving someone stealing a nuclear weapon and using it to blackmail the government for money. This time, it’s John Travolta and Christian Slater as rival fighter pilots.

Travolta’s character, “Deak Deakins,” turns out to be evil, with a plan to steal a pair of nuclear weapons. In his scheme, he’s joined by a money man (Bob Gunton) and henchmen (one of whom is former NFL star Howie Long, then in his brief period of appearing in movies).

While many ‘90s movies set the danger within or near a city, Broken Arrow is set almost entirely in the Southwestern desert, with Slater’s hero, Riley Hale, teaming up with a comely park ranger (Samantha Mathis) to foil Travolta’s evil plan.

Broken Arrow was part of Travolta’s mid-‘1990s comeback run, as Broken Arrow followed Pulp Fiction in 1994 and Get Shorty in 1995. And one of the guys Travolta shot in Pulp Fiction, Frank Whaley, played an archetype of Clinton-era cinema: The surprisingly young genius presidential adviser, obviously based on the White House era of George Stephanopoulos. Other situation room characters were portrayed by the likes of Delroy Lindo and Kurtwood Smith.

I don’t regard Broken Arrow as highly as some of its contemporary movies, for a few different reasons. One is that it’s far from the best of Woo’s Hollywood run; Face/Off, also with Travolta, came along the following year, and is both more audacious and a better all-around action film.

Another movie from 1996 about a decorated military officer stealing weapons of mass destruction and using them to blackmail the government, The Rock, was also much better in just about every way.

Another thing about Broken Arrow? It’s a movie that I can never separate from Roger Ebert’s review of it.