A Life Through Film #013: Broken Arrow

The misery of mediocrity sure ain't cool

Release Date: 2/9/1996

Weeks at Number One: 2

Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!

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The United States spent the decades of the Cold War building up its arsenal of nuclear weaponry in an arms race with the Soviet Union. Though Mutually Assured Destruction kept either superpower from pulling the trigger, the USA had to stay ready just in case it was time for doomsday. With a peak of over 31,000 weapons of mass destruction in our arsenal in 1967, we were very ready as a country to blow shit up on a truly epic scale. 

The problem when you’re moving around that many nuclear weapons, however, is that you’re bound to lose at least a few of them at some point. 

Since 1950, the United States has “misplaced” around 30 nuclear weapons, usually due to transportation emergencies like plane crashes or accidental jettisons due to human error. In most cases, the WMDs are recovered quickly and everyone gets to breathe a sigh of relief. But to date, there have been three cases where the United States has lost a nuclear weapon and never recovered it, usually due to them being onboard the wreck of a deep sea submarine. 

As the movie we’re covering today quips, it’s a tad disturbing to know that the disappearance of these threats to civilization is common enough to warrant a codeword for it. As revealed in a declassified Department of Defense document in the 1980s, the US government refers to these incidents as “broken arrows.” 

Hey, that’s the name of this week’s movie! 

Broken Arrow is an American action movie starring John Travolta and Christian Slater. The two play Air Force officers and best friends who suddenly find themselves as bitter enemies when Travolta betrays Slater and the entire United States to abscond with two nuclear weapons in order to blackmail the US government. The movie released in early February of 1996 and stayed on top of the box office for two weekends, though it only had to contend with new releases during its second weekend of release. 

One of these days, I’m going to be able to cover a movie where there isn’t much to say. It’ll be some forgotten dump month champ that only topped the box office for a weekend because it was the best of the slop available. Maybe it’ll be a hidden gem, but probably not. Most media that’s widely released exists in a quality range from Bad to Mediocre, no matter how sturdy our rose colored glasses of a given era may be. When I initially looked up 1996’s Broken Arrow, I thought that I had finally reached my first Easy Week. I had never heard of it, nor had heard anyone mention it ever. Surely, there was nothing there to look into. 

But as I’ve said before, every movie that comes out, no matter its quality, is a miracle. And Broken Arrow is a miracle of sorts. It’s the confluence of three hot prospects of the mid ‘90s coming together to make a big budget action movie. The screenwriter of one the decade’s biggest surprise hits, an acclaimed international director making in-roads in Hollywood after years of success abroad, and the continuation of the comeback story of the decade. On the talent of its roster alone, Broken Arrow is fascinating. 

Graham Yost was a well-read Canadian who was encouraged by his parents to pursue writing. Starting off with Nickelodeon shows and a few episodes of Full House was certainly an inauspicious beginning to his career, but he was able to break out quickly with his first movie script.¹ 

1994’s Speed is a movie that works on almost every level, but the excellence really starts with the premise. A badboy cop faces off with a mad bomber by dealing with the puzzle of a city bus that can’t run below 50 miles per hour or else it will explode. It’s a strong idea for an action movie, bolstered by fun characters, snappy dialogue, and smart twists as the film goes on. More than a conceptually good movie, the film was handily directed by Jan de Bont (whose work will appear in this column soon) and features career-defining performances from Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Daniels, and ESPECIALLY Dennis Hopper. Speed is awesome. Go watch it if you haven’t. [4/5]

Not only does Speed rule, but it made over $350 million at the box office. That’s the kind of hit that guarantees everyone involved at least some work for years after, and screenwriter Yost was no exception. The studio that put out Speed, 20th Century Fox, was obviously thrilled with the result of his work, and signed him on to write more money makers. 

I can’t find any interviews or quotes where Yost explains the story behind the writing of Broken Arrow. There were no cases of actual broken arrows or military treason anywhere near the time when he would have been writing the script for the movie. Maybe he saw the term, thought it was cool, and wrote the movie around it. Totally possible! However it came to be, Yost’s script was able to attract the attention of one of the most legendary action directors of all time. 

For those with an interest in action movies, the name John Woo conjures a vivid image in the mind. Slow motion shootouts where slick antiheroes, dual wielding pistols, dive over and around cover as thousands of sparks and explosions go off around them, their foes vanquished by the truckload while scores of squibs explode red viscous fluid off of their thrashing bodies. Woo’s style of over the top, highly choreographed, stylish action, known in film circles as “Heroic Bloodshed,” has been a major influence on American action for decades now; previous column subject From Dusk Till Dawn was made by two famous Western devotees to Heroic Bloodshed and the Rule of Cool. 

Woo started his career making more standard, boring comedies and musicals in his native Hong Kong, but by the late ‘80s, he was ready for a change. His Chinese breakout, 1986’s A Better Tomorrow, contains the initial inklings of Heroic Bloodshed: elaborate large scale shootouts, stories dripping with melodramatic machismo, frequent collaborator Chow Yun-Fat, etc. The movie had a tiny budget and no spend for marketing, but Woo’s bold vision for a new kind of action movie catapulted A Better Tomorrow to massive success in Hong Kong both commercially and critically. I watched it for this review and admittedly had to deal with pretty scuffed visual quality and subtitles. Even then, I could tell it was something special. I’ll give it a 3/5 for now, but with proper quality I could see myself bumping it up by a full point. 

Woo was suddenly the biggest director in Hong Kong, and he continued making waves and refining his style with big local hits like The Killer in 1989². It was 1992’s Hard Boiled that marked his international breakthrough, a perfect distillation of Heroic Bloodshed. Gunfights staged beautifully on an epic scale, simple yet clever dialogue between cool characters, and slick as hell action as those characters slide across floors, jump off of motorcycles, ride rolling hospital gurneys, and more, all while firing hundreds of rounds of ammunition. It all rules. Hard Boiled is one of the best action movies of the early ‘90s, and a high point for the genre as a whole [4.5/5]. 

Hard Boiled performed well in Hong Kong, but it was a sensation amongst genre fans in America and the West. Hollywood took notice and began courting Woo, who was already eager to get working in America. His first film stateside was 1993’s Hard Target, starring Jean Claude Van Damme. This movie is a ridiculous reimagining of The Most Dangerous Game set in New Orleans, and is a super fun time. Its New Orleans setting gives the movie a strong sense of place, and it even hints at an always-topical message of the elite taking violent advantage of the American poor. If you like action movies at all, I heartily recommend it [3.5/5]. 

Even though Hard Target brought some learning pains with it as Woo figured out how to make one of his movies in America, it ended up doing quite well financially, pulling in about $75 million on a $20 million budget. Despite it not being the best work of his career, the movie still stands out from all of its peers. Director and Heroic Bloodshed fan Sam Rami explained it best: 

Woo at 70% is still going to blow away most American action directors working at 100%

Despite its success, Hard Target was just a trial. His next movie would be his first big American movie, as Broken Arrow was filmed with a $50 million budget, over twice as much as what Hard Target was made with. Woo explained the appeal of Broken Arrow for him in a behind the scenes featurette for HBO around the film’s release. The theme of male friendship and the outside forces that can damage it is a recurring motif in many of his movies, including A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled. To get an American script that touched on the same theme and also included plenty of high octane action meant it was right up Woo’s alley. 

So we’ve got a script written by a proven hitmaking scribe, and a director who to this day is synonymous with top notch action filmmaking. How about the guys in front of the camera? John Travolta’s been covered in this column before for his leading role in Get Shorty, and he had just won a Golden Globe for that performance as he was promoting Broken Arrow. Travolta was not an action guy at this point, saying in an interview with critic Bobbie Wygant that it’s “not his genre.” But he was drawn to working with Woo, whose movies he had been shown by (of course) Quentin Tarantino. As Travolta further explained to Wygant:

John Woo is such an artist at [the] action genre that he’s the reason [why I did the movie.]

Originally, the studio had offered Travolta the role of the protagonist, Captain Hale. But the actor said it would be more interesting if he instead played the treasonous villain, Major Deakins, as a twist to what people were expecting. Though he hadn’t really ever played a villain like this before, Travolta already knew that he had to have fun with it, since the best villains usually have at least some of the audience rooting for them over the protagonist. 

Speaking of protagonists, it sure was an odd choice to pick Christian Slater for the heroic lead of Broken Arrow. The young Slater had been a big box office star for a few years by 1996, but he was most known for playing troubled antiheroes in movies like Heathers [4.5/5] and True Romance. A white meat babyface that tries his best to save the day and the girl like his character here is about as against type as Travolta is playing the diabolical villain. 

So we’ve established our big players, all of whom have serious credentials when it comes to making either good movies, action movies, or good action movies. Do the pieces come together in the end for Broken Arrow? For me, not really. Somehow, this ends up being one of the most boring action movies I’ve ever seen. Despite plenty of sweeping vistas of the American southwest, big explosions, and vehicle destruction, the set pieces and bombast of Broken Arrow fail to make much of an impact on the primordial lizard part of my brain that usually gets into stuff like that. 

A big part of that comes down to the character writing. The biggest problem is that there isn’t any. Every single character is just a dialogue delivery device that falls to one side of the good/evil divide because the script needs to balance the sides of the shootouts just right. What do these characters believe in? What are their histories? Do they fear anything? Love anything? Regret anything? Need anything? With characters this lifeless, it’s impossible to get invested in any of the action, no matter how technically competent it is. Contrast to Hard Boiled or Speed, where even the most cartoonish characters have some semblance of a real human being in them, and the difference is clear.

The performances are almost as lifeless as the writing. Slater does a fine job of saying the lines on the page as they’re written in a competent manner, but this is not the guy to play your big American action hero with any kind of panache. Samantha Mathis plays the female lead and sure does kind of try. I can’t fault her performance too much, since her character is written solely to be a damsel in distress later in the third act. And don’t worry, her and Slater’s characters end up together by the end because they found themselves standing next to each other and occasionally saying “Come on, this way!” during all the movie’s action scenes. Romance! 

Travolta, meanwhile, is easily the best part of Broken Arrow. He’s clearly having a blast saying the only good lines in the movie, like when he grits his teeth in annoyance and asks his right hand man to stop shooting his gun at the thermonuclear weapon (because Slater is next to it). Every one of his deliveries drips with sadistic snark and often a sense of glee at the sheer fun of being a villain. His character’s motivations are the most basic you can get for a bad guy (“I want money!”), but Travolta is the biggest bright spot in Broken Arrow because he gets that villains are supposed to be at least a little bit fun. 

Like I said earlier, this is a totally competent movie in terms of action and score, but they lack those special John Woo twists that make his movies so exciting. Instead of legions of henchmen getting mowed down by the dozen, there are basically only a handful of characters involved in gunfights at a time, slowing their pace to a crawl. The remote desert environments look great, but Woo’s fight choreography works best in complex urban settings where his heroes and villains can use the spaces in creative ways during combat. 

Instead, in Broken Arrow it’s a lot of hiding behind cover, popping out, and taking pot shots like a Gears of War rip off circa 2009. The resulting action is less inspired than anything I’ve seen from John Woo since he was still figuring things out in the early scenes of A Better Tomorrow. During that HBO featurette, Woo claims that Broken Arrow is the most fun movie he’s ever made, citing the high octane vehicle set pieces and snappy dialogue from Travolta. Well in Hard Target, Jean Claude Van Damme punches a rattlesnake in the face to knock it out before ripping its rattle off with his teeth. Agree to disagree, Mr. Woo.

So if the characters are flat and the action is lackluster, what is there to care about? You would think there might be some attempt at a message about the dangers of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists or a general anti-WMD sentiment in a movie like this. But I’m frightened by the prospect that in Broken Arrow, nothing means anything. The characters don’t represent real world ideologies, the events of the story don’t map cleanly to any metaphors or ideas, and the imagery is evocative of nothing except for the deserts of Utah. 

This is a movie about two characters fighting over nuclear weapons, not for any deeply ethical reason, but because one wants to use them to threaten hundreds of thousands of lives in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars, and the other thinks that would be bad to do. The nuclear weapons aren’t anything more to the story than plot devices to ratchet up the tension. They have big countdown timers on them, see, so we always know how close they are to blowing up.

In the most literal definition of the word possible, these are the most awesome creations in human history. Broken Arrow spares nary a second towards reflection on their usage or right to exist in a post-Cold War world. These nukes could have been replaced by colonies of mutated killer bees and the plot would remain exactly the same.

As I write this, I keep coming back to the thesis of this whole column: seeking connection and understanding with American culture in a given time based on the movies that people were watching. I’ve looked at the major news events of the weeks, months, years before this movie came out, trying to find anything relevant to the plot points of Broken Arrow. And I’m here to report that the only thing that this movie represents about America in early 1996 is that people still found John Travolta a big enough draw to see basically anything he was in. This is escapism in the purest sense in the world: no metaphors, no real world analogs, no big ideas to ponder. Broken Arrow exists in a vacuum, wholly unconnected to the world it was released in and to the people who bought tickets to see it. 

Every other movie I’ve reviewed so far in this column has always had at least a few big or big-ish websites post retrospective reviews, interviews, or oral histories to mark a big anniversary since its release. There has been no such reflection on Broken Arrow as time has moved on from its release. Despite pulling in almost $150 million worldwide, the most lingering legacy of this movie is inspiring the name of Ain’t It Cool News, a long time culture and movie news site that pulled its moniker from one of Travolta’s villainous lines in the third act. 

Actually, if you’re the type of person who keeps up with movie criticism, Broken Arrow is notable for one other reason. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s movie review show Siskel and Ebert was famous for the entertaining debates the two critics would have with each other about the movies of the time. There was only one time, however, that one was able to convince the other to change their recommendation of a movie while cameras were rolling. Though he initially recommended the movie, Siskel was moved by Ebert’s criticism of the plot and characters to reconsider his own thoughts and decided to instead give Broken Arrow a thumbs down. 

That’s got to be the most visual demonstration of “Mixed Reviews” I’ve ever seen, which is appropriate given Broken Arrow’s overall reception. Some critics didn’t like it, and the ones that did weren’t over the moon about it. Why did it do so well at the box office that it ended up being the 20th highest grossing picture of 1996? Competent action and popular names during the dump months will do that, I guess. 

I’ve spent a shocking amount of time writing about this movie that I didn’t even like all that much. The void of merit and interest in Broken Arrow have left me baffled and nearly as frightened as a missing nuclear weapon. Though technically competent because of its director and host to a few funny lines by John Travolta, the movie lacks any kind of spark that makes it compelling to consider as art. I’ve seen John Woo and John Travolta movies that I’ve enjoyed less than Broken Arrow that I think are more interesting than it as creative endeavors. 

The ideal way to watch this movie is to see it playing on the TV in a waiting room, likely with the sound off and the subtitles on, while you wait for a routine checkup. You will glimpse some decent action and explosions, as well as a few quality funny faces by John Travolta. Then a nurse will call your name, you’ll enter the examination room, and the movie will vanish from your mind’s eye. Broken Arrow is the purest definition of disposable entertainment. Skip it, or don’t. Your life will be the same either way.

Thankfully, this initial collaboration between Woo and Travolta was only the start. The two will work together again and make one of the most entertaining action movies of the 1990s. Ain’t it cool?

Rating: 2.5/5

Works Cited

Next Week: Let’s watch an actually fun action movie and watch the breakout moment for one of the biggest stars on Earth. Next Friday, we’ll be looking at Rumble in the Bronx!

See you then!

-Will

1. Yost wouldn’t be long for the world of movies; he pivoted to TV in the early 2000s and was the showrunner for Justified and The Americans.

2. If you were watching the Olympics on Peacock this year, you’re probably aware this recently got an American remake