DIRECTOR: Michael Bay

CAST: Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Alec Baldwin, Jon Voight, Colm Feore, Tom Sizemore, Cuba Gooding Jr., Dan Aykroyd, Mako

REVIEW:

Pearl Harbor is intended to be a crowd pleaser, combining a wartime historical backdrop to rouse patriotic American audiences flocking to the theater with one of those melodramatic wartime love stories from the 1950s or 1960s. Considering it’s a product of producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay, it also features lots of splashy special effects, “dramatic” slow-motion shots, cheesy one-liners, corny “patriotic” speeches, over-the-top flag-waving, and stuff blowing up real good. When it comes to the centerpiece depiction of the Pearl Harbor attack, the $135 million budget is all over the screen. It’s a pity a little more effort couldn’t have been spent on the script. Also, that centerpiece sequence only occupies about 35 minutes of a bloated 183 minute “epic” runtime.