Start with a porridge of war movie clichés, add a major Hollywood star, flavor with a dash of Hong Kong-style violence, and what do you get? Something like the unpalatable gruel of John Woo's latest big-budget film,Windtalkers. This film is bad enough that it should be avoided by all but the most die-hard fans of Woo and/or WWII.

Still, Woo's most recent move away from his roots in unlimited-ammunition shoot-'em-ups has one extra ingredient that makes Windtalkers more interesting than your standard military film: Indians.

Or rather, Navajos, members of the Bitter Water People, as Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach) clarifies to the terminologically limited and culturally insensitive Joseph Enders (Nicolas Cage). The film traces the parallel voyages of Enders, a wounded Marine with an axe to grind who returns to the Pacific front by lying about his fitness for battle, and Yahzee, a Navajo who has been recruited as a radio-man for his ability to speak a language that leaves the Japanese scratching their heads and muttering things like, "It sounds like they're speaking underwater!" and "That can't be English!"

The film starts with pans across desolate Navajo country, desert and butte stretching far as the eye can see; then it fades to a close-up of an infant, Yahzee's, held up to the sky with a flowing American flag in the background. If metaphors were martial arts, this would be a blow to the head with a blunt weapon--a symbolic move so blatant, so obvious, that you can almost read the stage directions (cut to flag, cue patriotic music, symbolize Navajos' deep patriotism). This kind of imagery might be OK for The Lion King, but it just seems tacky here, as it does when we later learn that Yazhee's child is named George Washington Yazhee. Even if it really did happen this way--even if the image were taken straight from a 1943 photo of a Navajo serviceman on his way to the front, even if there really is a G.W. Yazhee in the birth register--no amount of historical authenticity could keep it from feeling manipulative and shallow.

In addition to Enders, another army man, Pete "Ox" Henderson (Christian Slater), is also assigned to protect--and kill, if need be--a Navajo code talker. While Cage and Beach slog through their standard-issue lines, Slater and Roger Willie (in his acting debut as Charlie Whitehorse) turn in the film's only convincing performances. Much of their limited screen time is wasted on scenes of cross-cultural bonding that are painful to watch (harmonica and pipe duet, anyone?), but they still manage to create characters with more depth, complexity, and humanity than Cage's tough-on-the-outside, sweet-on-the-inside soldier or Beach's earnest, simple-minded country boy.

As the movie rolls from the first awkward meeting of Yahzee and Enders towards its finale, a grand battle on the Japanese island of Saipan, we get to see most of our favorite war scenes replayed, with worse acting: a game of poker in which a taciturn Cage displays his guts of steel, a campfire chat about the girls back home, a soldier dying as he tries to rescue his best friend. These staples have been given the treatment they deserve elsewhere, and not too long ago.

Fortunately, the battle scenes, which are several and extensive, are better than the rest of the movie. A scene where Yahzee disguises himself as a Japanese soldier, and Enders as his prisoner, provides a moment of such stark role reversal and identity confusion that, for a moment, one hopes that the movie is about to rise above its uninspired beginning. Earlier in the film, Yahzee is attacked by a racist American soldier and Enders, who watches passively while Yazhee kicks the snot out of him, casually affirms, "You do look like a Nip." Minutes later, Yazhee has his own epiphany and tells Enders, "You're right, Joe, I do look like a Nip." Then he dons the uniform of a dead man in order to save his squad. It's a recognition that all is fair in love and war--even taking advantage of the other side's inability to recognize one of their own, or accepting that your own side's inability to see past color, racist as it is, could come in handy.

Unfortunately, it's downhill from there. Because Woo is unable to leave his Hong Kong past completely behind, Cage is forced into the role of one-man army (think Chow Yun Fat in The Killer). Somehow it doesn't come off as well with soldiers as it did with gangsters--maybe we just have too much sympathy for the former. Or maybe it's just harder to believe that Cage could survive on an open field with mortar rounds exploding around him and Japanese soldiers charging kamikaze-style than it is to believe that Chow could make it through a warehouse fight. And so the scene where Yahzee passes as Japanese, which starts so well, ends just as flatly and implausibly as the rest of the movie's battle scenes: Enders kills dozens of well-armed Japanese soldiers and Yahzee saves the day, using the radio to call off the friendly fire that had been devastating his squad.

It would be unfair to leave out the film's few magical moments. When Yahzee steals cigarettes from a drunken Enders to blow smoke over his body, the combination of mischief, visual beauty and solemn ritual is just right. And when Whitehorse is being dragged away by a five-man team of Japanese soldiers, the long moment of eye-to-eye communication he shares with Enders, crouched nearby with a grenade in hand, psyching himself up for the throw that will kill Whitehorse (and thus "protect the code"), reveals the inherent power and tension of the situation Woo has created. It's much more eloquent than all that breath wasted on clichéd dialogue. But this is a 133-minute movie that feels even longer. A few good moments can't buoy a sinking weight.

A little bit of ritual smoke, no fire

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