The poorest film Steven Spielberg has ever directed  a colossal mish-mash that has only curiosity value going for it.

Rating: 3/10 (6 August 2006)

Steven Spielberg has spent the past three decades directing one successful movie after another. A look down his list of work would throw up titles like Duel, Jaws, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, E.T, Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, Jurassic Park, plus many other box office goliaths. What is more impressive still is the fact that many of his films are very good too. Not just box office successes, but genuinely well-made and well-crafted films. It is hard to think of many Spielberg films that are truly bad  some might mention Always, a somewhat soppy and forgettable love story from 1989, while others would opt for Hook, a rather over-glamorised revisit of the Peter Pan story made in 1991. But neither of these movies is actually BAD in the true sense of the word - just disappointingly average when compared to the director's better works. There is, however, one Spielberg film that fails in a spectacular way, one film so overblown, disorganised and clumsily structured that there might be proper reason to regard it a disaster. That film is 1941.
America is thrown into panic when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbour shortly before Christmas, 1941. On the Californian coast, people suddenly brace themselves for the possibility of a Japanese attack against their great coastal cities such as San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is around this time that various people get caught up in adventures during one hectic night in LA. First, there's family man Ward Douglas (Ned Beatty), whose house overlooks the Pacific Ocean  he spends the entire evening engaged in a gunfight with a Jap submarine that surfaces in the bay opposite his home. Hollis Wood (Slim Pickens) is captured by the same Japanese submariners and swallows a compass so that they cannot easily navigate their way back out to sea. Then there's crazy pilot Wild Bill Kelso (John Belushi), who single handedly patrols the sky in his battered fighter plane, searching for enemy planes approaching the American coast. Meanwhile, young fast-food chef Wally Stephens (Bobby Di Cicco) spends the entire evening trying to win the affections of a young beauty, but faces stiff competition from the horny soldier Sitarski (Treat Williams); womanising army man Birkhead (Tim Matheson) lies his way into danger in order to impress a sexy female named Donna (Nancy Allen); and a couple of nitwits (Murray Hamilton, Eddie Deezen) spend the night on a fairground ferris wheel looking out for enemy planes and submarines in a foolhardy attempt to protect their country from an invasion.
It's obvious just from the plot synopsis that 1941 is a cluttered, unfocused mess of a movie. There's too much going on  too many unrelated subplots and too many big actors in preposterously brief guest roles  for the film's own good. To further confound matters, Spielberg opts to present the film, in his own words, as a "stupidly outrageous celebration of paranoia". In other words, he has turned this plot in the unlikeliest of comedies. However, Spielberg's idea of comedy in this film is to throw as much broad slapstick and expensive destruction at the audience as he can. The non-stop obliteration of streets, buildings, vehicles and even fairground rides loses its ability to provoke laughter through sheer unrelenting repetition. Throughout his career Spielberg has often been criticised for being too sentimental, but in this film he goes completely the other way and creates a film that is, if anything, excessively destructive and anarchic. 1941 is a spectacular failure  worth seeing on a curiosity level, but certainly not interesting in any other way.