‘Broken Arrow’

Not one to waste any time, John Woo, Hong Kong’s premier action director, just about flattens viewers with his opening sequence, a volume-enhanced boxing match between John Travolta’s Air Force Maj. Vic Deakins and Christian Slater’s (pictured) Capt. Riley Hale. More than being Hale’s superior, Deakins is invariably the winner in their ongoing sporting competitions, and he doesn’t tire of baiting the younger man about his pitiable absence of the will to win. This kind of intense masculine rivalry, traditionally the motor that drives Woo’s pictures, heats up considerably in Graham Yost’s script when the two men, co-pilots on the supersecret B-3 Stealth bomber, go out one night on a supposedly routine training mission. Deakins, however, is involved in a plot to steal the plane’s pair of nuclear warheads and use them to extort millions from a presumably terrified American government. And though other military operatives and teams of armed and dangerous men are eventually involved, it always boils down to Deakins battling Hale across the length and breadth of the scenic American Southwest (HBO Sunday at 8 p.m.)