The Travolta/Cage Project #44 Broken Arrow (1996)
Some days you just can’t win. I seem to be experiencing a lot of those lately. Yesterday, for example, we recorded the Broken Arrow/Kiss in the Death episode of Travolta/Cage with guest Joe Berkowitz and it only recorded the first half. I felt so defeated that I more or less wrote the day off as a loss. Then I woke up this morning to discover that my half-completed article about Broken Arrow had mysteriously disappeared as well.
It’s the damn Russians, I tell ya! They’d just as soon sabotage a struggling writer’s productivity as undermine the American people’s faith in democracy. The powers that be were obviously worried that my take on the film–that it’s goofy fun and John Travolta is great in it—would prove so incendiary that it would cause the internet to LITERALLY explode like some manner of underground nuclear explosion.
They needn’t have worried! These articles tend to be modestly read but what they lack in page-views they also lack in influence and power. Yet we persist all the same because it’s so much goddamn fun I can hardly stand it. John Woo’s 1996 military western Broken Arrow is not high art but it is tremendous fun.
Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis, the stars of the 1990 ham radio teen angst cult classic Pump Up the Volume reunite as the kind of straight-up squares who would have engendered the bitter, sarcastic vitriol of Slater’s Hard on Harry on Harry. Slater is straight up working for the man as straight arrow Air Force pilot Captain Riley Hale while Mathis is Terry Carmichael, a park ranger who finds herself in the unenviable position of trying to prevent a nuclear attack and with it the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
In our era of the action star as a quivering mass of muscles with the body of a God, a modern-day Collusus, as it were, there’s something oddly refreshing and ingratiating about slightly built, average-sized heroes like Slater, who at 5’9 is a good five inches shorter than the 6’2 Travolta, and the 5’5, surprisingly badass Mathis.
Like the similarly lilliputian Tom Cruise, Slater apparently did many of his own stunts but that did not keep me from experiencing intense cognitive dissonance watching the tiny little man swoop in and kick NFL legend Howie Long so hard that the impact causes him to reel backwards and crash through the wall of a train to his death.
Travolta’s rogue pilot Major Vic "Deak" Deakins towers over his costars physically as completely as the actor playing him dominates the film. Travolta does not steal Broken Arrow because from his very first moment onscreen the movie absolutely belongs to him.
Deak makes for a decidedly chatty villain. He’s the kind of excessively verbose bad guy who tells the good guy what he’s going to do, how he’s going to do it and when he’s going to do it, and then for good measure where he’s going to go for a celebratory dinner afterwards (Applebees, weirdly enough).
Broken Arrow opens with its hero and villain facing off in a boxing ring in a sequence that hammers home its allegorical connotations with the force and subtlety of Deak punching his much younger co-worker In the face repeatedly, to teach him about boxing and life but also for the sheer pleasure.
Deak and Riley then fly a Stealth bomber containing a pair of nuclear missiles on a secret mission that goes awry when Deak pulls a heel turn and knocks out his fellow pilot and releases the nukes without activating them so that he and his sinister collaborators can blackmail the United States government for hundreds of million of dollars not to make a major American city go kablooie.
It’s as if a switch goes off inside Deak and he morphs instantly and dramatically from hero to villain, from happy tool of American foreign policy to renegade traitor. As Deak, Travolta maintains a level of kinetic energy throughout seemingly only accessible otherwise through the prolonged and intense use of powerful stimulants.
Deak and his merry band of mercenaries, most notably sidekick Kelly (Howie Long), are being financed by Pritchett (Bob Gunton). Gunton, who is famous for playing glowering, pickle-faced authority figures in movies like The Shawshank Redemption and Patch Addams, has a hilariously grouchy dynamic with Travolta as a gruff killjoy who just wants to steal nuclear weapons in order to blackmail the government for hundreds of millions of dollars and can’t understand why the process isn’t going more smoothly.
How much more to bring me the head of that infernal Patch Addams?
Gunton plays Pritchett as a cross between a grumpy middle manager who can’t believe how far behind his employees are on an important project and a disappointed dad whose son promised he’d mow the lawn but is instead sitting in the backyard, drinking beer and smoking weed with his buddies. Pritchett does not seem to realize that a wild-eyed lunatic who is willing to betray his country and nuke American citizens is probably also willing to shut his financier up if he gets too mouthy and belligerent, forever as it turns out.
Riley survives the crash and hooks up with Ranger Terry in order to stop his friend-turned-enemy from unleashing the power of our country’s nuclear arsenal against his own people.
Broken Arrow was not based on a video game. It didn’t inspire a video game either yet its structure reminded me throughout of an unusually satisfying Super Nintendo game. It’s easy to imagine the movie’s set-pieces as levels. The game would start with the Stealth flight, then move to an underground stage that is the sight of an underground nuclear explosion that powerfully illustrates Woo’s legendary gift for blowing things up and end with a battle Royale on a speeding train where, in a characteristic bit of understatement, Deak eventually ends up on the receiving end of a nuclear missile. It’s like they always say: you live by the nuke, you die by the nuke. Literally.
Usually when a critic compares a movie to a video game it’s meant as a criticism but Broken Arrow would rank as perhaps the greatest video game movie of all time (better even than Rampage! )if it were based on an actual video game. Travolta would obviously DESTROY in the cut-scenes to a Broken Arrow video game the way he destroys in the thrilling final act of Broken Arrow. And its second act. And its first.
Travolta begins the movie at eleven. He gets bigger and more theatrical until he’s attained a kaiju level of villainy. Then again, King Kong and Godzilla were positively restrained in their antics compared to Travolta as Deak. As he skips giddily past the point of no return, Deak seems to be getting high off his own badness. As Deak enthuses happily after setting off a nuclear bomb, “What a rush!”
In Broken Arrow, Travolta embraces villainy with his whole body and soul. That big, blinding movie star smile has never seemed more malevolent. Those beautiful blue eyes radiate anger and insanity. He’s as charismatic and magnetic as ever, but to sinister ends. Conventional wisdom holds that the bad guys get all the best lines. That’s certainly true of Graham Yost’s gloriously pulpy, campy screenplay.
Broken Arrow is a glorious exercise in popcorn escapism, a goofy, pop-operatic thrill ride that’s more than just a swell warm-up for Face/Off.
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