Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Broken Arrow!

Theme: Quote Unquote - Mr Bungle

SPOILEUSE!!!

The great where-do-you-want-to-eat-tonight standoff continues.

The greatest and best of the 90s' Big Orange Fireball Explosion movies, Broken Arrow is chiefly notable for its use of doing it right - a long-forgotten cinématic technique where the list of boxes you tick looks like this:

Fun, likable, resourceful hero: ✅

Fun, hammy, but credibly menacing villain: ✅

Likable feminine heroine: ✅

Creative action sequences: ✅

Twists and turns in the action to keep it fresh: ✅

Cool scenery porn: ✅

A bit of humour: ✅

≥4 helicopters blowed up: ✅

John Woo is perhaps second only to James Bond in his inexplicable antipathy toward helicopters.

The plot concerns an average day in the life of John Travolta (The Punisher), whose scheme to hijack a pair of nukes for ransom and/or shits and giggles hits a snag only when his copilot and bro Christian Slater catches wind and tries to stop him, enlisting the aid of adorable park ranger Terry (Samantha Mathis) as he goes, for this kinögraph is set in Utah's Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, because it looks cool.

In the good old days you just had to stand around with your thumb up your ass waiting for kino clouds to form.

When a movie does everything right, it often leaves little to talk about. The most nonsensical component is the contrived ticking clocks that result no less than twice when one of the nukes is armed. Naturally, these give our heroes just enough time to escape and/or disarm them. While the first time can be overlooked because Travolta needs to get away as well, the second time he's planning to die in the blast, so why set it to five minutes instead of five seconds? Fortunately, "to be moar entertaining" is a perfectly good explanation for this character in-story, because his main motivation seems to be to set himself a challenge and have fun.

This is in fact also my motivation.

It's kind of endearing the way Travolta sort of mentors Slater through the runtime, even though they're enemies for most of it. It's like their broship doesn't have to end just because one of them turns out to be a psycho. You get the impression Slater would have visited Travolta in the can had he been taken alive. Every man should have a bro as tight. Also, the movie has a guy get kicked off a railway bridge, which is worth a star in itself.

I hope he's alright.