Pearl Harbor (2001) More at IMDb Pro »

This bloated, overblown, tediously overlong, hilariously cheesy 'Titanic' wannabe showcases plenty of expertise in the visual effects department and nothing but laughable bombast everywhere else. 'Titanic' worked because James Cameron knew how to find the balance between fictional, old-fashioned cornball romance and a devastatingly true-life disaster. The sinking of the ship was not just a stunning achievement technically but also truly emotionally draining. Cameron had respect for his subject matter.

This monstrosity, on the other hand, is a disrespectful, clueless chump of a movie that plays like Bay thought he'd been far too restrained on 'Armageddon'. The bombing sequence is full of headless, armless and legless corpses, drooling shots of soldiers getting blown up, lovingly composed shots of torpedoes heading towards their targets, and a detailed succession of explosions, bullet hits and crashing planes so endless that I got the feeling that, rather than wanting us to realise the horror of the attack, Bay just can't leave anything unseen. It's warnography of the worst kind.

As for the screenplay, put a peg on your nose. Every line of dialogue is either a pompous pronouncement, a howlingly clichéd clanger, a hindsighted historical prediction, or what seems like the beginning of a momentous speech. Seriously, how were the crew not chewing their jumpers in an attempt to hide their laughter? Josh Hartnett's okay though, and likable for the first time, while Ben Affleck embarrasses himself, Kate Beckinsale does herself no favours as she climbs another rung on the Hollywood ladder, and decent actors like Jon Voight, Alec Baldwin, Dan Aykroyd, Tom Sizemore and Jennifer Garner are wasted in varying levels of blathering idiocy.

Meantime, Hans Zimmer's score blasts us into submission, coating every vaguely patriotic, heroic or romantic moment with music so glutinous that it's like being held down while someone pours a bucketful of golden syrup into your face. In fact, uber-hack Bay overplays the entire thing, using every manipulative technique at his disposal, from slo-mo to quiet sound with 'moving' music to at least a billion million shots of people looking up at planes. This movie is a whole new kind of bad, and it makes '1941' look like a straight-faced docudrama.