Pearl Harbor... |
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Movie Review: Pearl Harbor
Starring: Ben Affleck, Josh
Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Cuba Gooding, Jr.
Director: Michael Bay
Producers: Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer
Music: Mid Way
Writers: Randall
Wallace |
The movie grafts 30 minutes or so of riveting air-and-sea
battle sequences onto a simplistic, clich�-ridden, 2 1/2-hour love triangle.
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Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett play childhood pals who grow
up to become dashing young pilots. Just before Affleck ships out for Great Britain to help
the R.A.F. battle Hitlers Luftwaffe, the Yank flyboy meets and falls in love with a
beautiful nurse (Kate Beckinsale). Screenwriter Randall Wallace doesnt sketch in so
much as a hint of a reason why we should care for any of these characters. |
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While Affleck fights the good fight over Europe, his pal and
his gal wind up in Pearl Harbor. When they receive word that the Germans shot down
Afflecks plane, they console each other .
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Of course, as any fan of soap opera-style melodrama could
guess, one should never assume that the hypotenuse of a love triangle has actually kicked
the bucket unless youve killed him yourself. Afflecks character arrives in
Hawaii scant moments before the Japanese zero in on their sitting-duck targets. The
bombing scenes take on a life of their own, as if culled from a different movie. From Bad
Boys to The Rock to Armageddon, Bay and Bruckheimer have demonstrated an escalating
proficiency with pyrotechnic mayhem. They blow up stuff as well as anyone in the business,
and their hell-breaking-loose montage of destruction as Japanese bombs decimate our
Pacific fleet rank with some of the most intense, gut-wrenching war. They could have
- and should have - gone out in a blaze of |
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glory. Instead, Bay and company cave in to their worst yahoo instincts. After
admirably resisting the |
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temptation to demonize the Japanese attackers, the
filmmakers tack on an anti-climactic half-hour during which the brave American pilots get
a chance to go back out and kick some Japanese.
The ending ties up the loose ends of the belaboured three-way romance. But it also reminds
us that theres something terribly wrong with a movie that takes nearly five times as
long to resolve a generic love story as it does to |
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recreate the infamous battle from which it gets its title. The two
problems with PEARL HARBOR are the writing and the charisma-lacking cast. Director Michael
Bay delivers a truly exciting long sequence on the |
bombing of Pearl Harbor but one has to sit through the weak
love story to get to the high-octane entertainment of devastation and destruction.
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