If this sounds a little cartoonish, it is, but who wants a morality play invading their escapism? Broken Arrow is a swift, entertaining action movie with appealing good guys and likable--no, lovable--bad guys. It features chases and fights on or in planes, boats, trains, trucks, helicopters and copper mines. (what, no spaceships?) All this is standard movie fare, but Woo, a veteran of the energetic Hong Kong film industry, has a genius for directing action sequences. His choices are invariably creative and unexpected, especially in the hand-to-hand combat scenes (the opening boxing sequence is brilliantly edited). Broken Arrow is full of jump cuts and slow motion, and though it's not as quirky as his work in Hong Kong, Woo's instincts are still different enough from the standards of Hollywood that this movie seems like a breath of fresh air.

I'll concede the first 15 minutes are rather wooden. These are minutes solemnly devoted to Character Development. We meet two Air Force pilots, Deakins (John Travolta) and Hale (Christian Slater). Deakins is Hale's commanding officer; soon, we see all too clearly they have a father/son relationship, with a healthy dose of rivalry tossed in. We learn this because they say things to each other people would never say, and reveal the kind of information conversations simply do not reveal. "You push too hard--that's why you've been passed over for promotion so many times!" And: "You love to fly, don't you? You're in this for life." Yeah, right. Well, you just have to wait, because once past that hump, the mayhem begins.

The term "broken arrow" refers to a nuclear weapon that's missing or stolen, apparently, and the bulk of the movie consists of the good guys trying to get one back before the bad guys torch the world. The good guys turn out to be Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis (together again at last, five years after Pump Up the Volume). Mathis plays Terry, a park ranger inadvertently sucked into the fracas, and she serves both as a love interest and an action hero in her own right. Travolta is commander of the evil guys, and, as usual, he's a pleasure to watch. As Deakins he waltzes through his moves with charisma and glee. Travolta is a very good actor rather than a great actor; it's hard to lose yourself in his performances. I'm always quite aware that he's acting, but he's so magnetic and has such presence that he conveys something more singular than great acting. Like John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, there's always a lot of Travolta in the role.

And what fun he has playing a villain! He's so cocky and sporting in his malevolence that it's hard to hate, or even dislike him. It's interesting that for all the cartoonish aspects of Broken Arrow, the villain ends up being something less than pure evil. The character of Deakins calls to mind the worthy adversary figure from old westerns; even the location evokes John Ford films--southern Utah, around Lake Powell, in the wide-open West. It's no surprise then that Deakins also reminded me of that other bomb-loving cowboy, Slim Pickens. References to Doctor Strangelove pop up all over this movie, from the scenes back at Central Control (reminiscent of the War Room in Strangelove), to the final demise of the bad guy.

Mathis and Slater do a decent job with their mostly athletic roles, though Slater tends to pale next to Travolta. Slater has the face and voice of a character actor, and I've always wondered how he gets so many leading-man jobs. Is he cute? I've read that he smokes heavily--a fun fact to keep in mind as you watch him leap and bound for an hour and a half. Mathis, on the other hand, is more appealing, though her role doesn't give her a chance to display much more than fear and spunk. Still, fear and spunk are all you really need in a fun piece of fluff like this one.