Fine battle sequences, but otherwise poor and laughable

Rating: 2/10 (26 May 2001)

I won't waste any of your time with a long review the way this film wasted 3 hours of my time. Simply put, there's about a half-hour of exciting, well-staged battle sequences that I wish I could have seen by themselves (perhaps theatres should list what time the battle scenes begin, then we can arrive late and miss the rest of the movie), and the rest of the film is dramatically weak, horribly written, and non-acted by two male leads who make Keanu Reeves seem like James Woods!! Ben Affleck is far too bland to carry a major motion picture, Josh Hartnett doesn't seem to be able to convincingly capture ANY emotion as an actor (one wonders how ANY woman would find him interesting!), and the female lead is given such a one-dimensional script that it's impossible to evaluate her performance. At least a dozen times during the film, the audience hooted at lines that were intended seriously, and some jokers in the audience actually completed the lines for the actors before the actors did--that's how cliche-ridden this dog was! Jon Voight as FDR was impressive, but someone should have told the filmmakers that an actor of Voight's caliber does not need to have a wax-museum style make-up job. I was waiting for Cuba Gooding Jr., but his performance is little more than a cameo and the script gives his character no depth. Alec Baldwin is badly miscast--audience members were making rude noises during his scenes. I'm surprised Disney didn't re-edit or re-shoot some of the film after what must have been poor preview response. TITANIC may have been a crowd-pleaser, but it did achieve what it set out to and I felt that I had more than gotten my money's worth from James Cameron and crew. As for this bomb, I feel like asking Bay-Bruckheimer for a refund--the battle sequences were worth about $1.00, so I feel as though I've been ripped off for the other $4.00 (PLEASE, don't pay over matinee price to see this!). Thanks to Roger Ebert, for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes!