'ARROW' ON TARGET, DESPITE WAVERING PLOT.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

"Broken Arrow" may have left story coherence on the cutting-room floor. But not a frame of style has been sacrificed, and that distinguishes this noisy, preposterous action thriller from the usual run of blast attractions. It's often difficult to put your brain on hold for one of these things, but the guys behind "Broken Arrow" make it as elegantly, excitingly easy as possible.

Basically a cross-country chase film that slows down regularly to blow stuff up, "Arrow" is the brainchild of "Speed" scripter Graham Yost. While hardly the tight-wound motion machine that the bus movie was, "Arrow" benefits from director John Woo's penchant for creatively staged mayhem and star John Travolta's superhuman sense of cool.

In fact, in his first flat-out villain role since the 1976 "Carrie," Travolta practically redefines suave menace for the muscle-movie age. He's Vic Deakins, a stealth bomber pilot who, unbeknownst to his friend and co-pilot, forthright Riley Hale (Christian Slater), engineers an elaborate plan to commandeer two nukes, then ransom them back to the U.S. government.

During a night flight over Utah, Deakins ejects Hale, parachutes the bombs down to some waiting henchmen and crashes the plane. Thinking there's been an accident, the Pentagon goes nuts; and even though there are contingencies for recovering lost atomic weapons (code-named broken arrows, hence the title), Deakins has thought of everything to foil the military's search efforts.

But he hasn't counted on Hale's surviving his dead drop. Nor on Hale hooking up with a plucky and resourceful park ranger, Terry Carmichael (Samantha Mathis). Nor on the two of them somehow being able to keep up with his well-equipped gang of highly trained terrorists (frankly, that's pretty hard for audiences to swallow, too).

Anyway, after somehow surviving an underground detonation of untold megatons, flaming Humvees and a couple of really excellent exploding helicopters, Hale and Carmichael battle the bad guys on a barreling freight train. This is where the most obvious "Speed" similarities occur, along with more than a few homages to "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and John Ford's "Stagecoach."

But there's also enough gravity-defying stunt work and balletic gunplay to mark this as a true Woo movie. While not as gory or stylized as the director's celebrated Hong Kong gangster pictures ("The Killer," "Hard Boiled"), "Broken Arrow" displays much more of Woo's staging genius than his first, woeful American production, "Hard Target," managed.

Working for the first time with a huge budget and all manner of miniature and computerized special effects, Woo inevitably loses some of his distinctive flavor here. Still, he brings more character to industrial-strength destruction than all but a handful of Hollywood action specialists.

But the most enjoyable aspect of "Broken Arrow" is Travolta's cruel confidence. Like "Get Shorty's" Chili Palmer, only focused on evil instead of movies, Travolta's Deakins can't even conceive of not being in control. This doesn't just make him a formidable adversary, it makes him irresistibly funny, especially in out-of-control situations.

"I'd prefer you didn't fire at the thermonuclear weapons," he calmly but firmly tells a trigger-happy cohort during a high-speed desert chase. It's nothing anybody of this earth would be able to say, under the circumstances, with such authoritative panache.

But John Travolta is a great movie star, and thus not subject to certain mortal limitations.

THE FACTS

The film: "Broken Arrow" (R; violence, language).

The stars: John Travolta, Christian Slater, Samantha Mathis, Delroy Lindo, Frank Whaley, Howie Long.

Behind the scenes: Directed by John Woo. Written by Graham Yost. Produced by Mark Gordon, Bill Badalato and Terence Chang. Released by 20th Century Fox.

Running time: One hour, 48 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three Stars.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

Photo Bomber Riley Hale (Christian Slater) and plucky park ranger Terry Carmichael (Samantha Mathis) team up to stop a gang of terrorists in "Broken Arrow."