Putting it simply, Windtalkers is terrible. Using more complicated verbiage, Windtalkers, the latest from Hong Kong director John Woo, is a World War II-era two-dimensional fantasy of multi-cultural male bonding that doesn't stand a chance from the word "go."

Opening in the Solomon Islands, Sergeant Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage) is caught in a no-win situation. Charged with holding a swamp from Japanese aggressors, his unit is overrun. With a bit of blind luck he survives their wholesale slaughter but loses his psychological security, physical balance and what little semblance he may once have had of a fully functioning human soul.

Enter Private Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach), a green recruit instructed in the coding uses of his native Navajo language to circumvent Japanese intelligence. Paired with Enders, who regains frontline duties with the help of doting Nurse Rita Swelton (Frances O'Connor), Yahzee encounters indifference in his would-be protector. Of course this is because Enders has been instructed to protect the code at any cost, killing Yahzee included.

Developed in parallel is another Navajo/cracker partnership between Sergeant Ox Henderson (Christian Slater) and Private Charles Whitehorse (Roger Willie). Their combination is less distant than Enders and Yahzee, but their closeness ends up betraying them in a harrowing battle sequence ending the film's second act. Through this battle and all the way up through an obvious ending, there are recognizable war movie motifs. Platoon members bond through a number of racially charged exchanges and, of course, they fight in numerous battles.

Where other Woo movies eschew everyday realities and become comic book-styled adventures of heroic bloodshed, Windtalkers sketches a larger canvas and comes up short. It's as if the normally fluid camera work is given too wide a field in the Pacific campaign, thereby muting the machismo-centered and honor bound troubles of its male leads. Featuring seemingly endless bullets and firefights, much of it lacking in balletic grace or believability, the resulting set pieces are boring instead of exciting.

This failure lies firmly at the feet of John Woo. Taken as a mid-career weighing post to one side of his highest achievements (The Killer, Hard Boiled, Face/Off) and slightest titles (Broken Arrow), Windtalkers is a parable of the director's career. It's the story of a little brown man (Woo/Yahzee) with specific skills (filmmaking/linguistics) joining a white-dominated American institution (Hollywood/military) to beat back its enemy (box office competition/Imperial Japan). Along the way he assimilates (makes Hard Target/kills in cold blood) and ends up overachieving only to lose himself in the process.