Pearl Harbor Details

The surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was a major event in US history (awakening the sleeping giant and all that), but this attempt to capture it on-screen by the big-thinking producer/director team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon) is a huge disappointment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the actual attack, which forms the middle act of the film's bloated three hours, is an amazing spectacle — it's almost worth the obscene $135-million budget. However, sheer cinematic power is undermined by our total lack of empathy for any of the cardboard cut-out characters who populate Bay's advert-like world of slow-motion and colour filters (and baseball-playing kids to signify America — yes, we get it). Weaknesses of plot and characterisation are only amplified by the film's unwieldy size and patriotic portent, and the script is toe-curlingly bad. Bruckheimer and Bay presumably think their love story and wartime heroics are charmingly old-fashioned. They have clearly not studied Casablanca or From Here to Eternity.

Mountainous labours have resulted in a simple-minded, flagwaving mouse of a movie, glib, glossy and frequently banal: the central romance is bad soap opera, and is acted that way, while the action has all the reality of a video game.