Good for a laugh........

Rating: Null/10 (3 June 2001)

This really does leave no cliche unsaid and no trite cinematic plot device unused. I sat through the first hour with friends, several of whom said they were going to leave (but didn't) and we weren't the only ones snorting into our popcorn with disbelief or guffawing at quite incredibly banal lines. How Kate Beckinsale got mixed up in this I don't know, she is a very highly educated woman (even if her father was a Seventies sitcom star)- the money I suppose, that is usually it. When she said some really awful line I half expected her to turn to the camera and give a knowing wink at times.
That said, I have to give it to ILM, the attack scenes are brilliant, especially the shot following the bomb down, if cartoonish and I'm not sure it was possible to fly planes that close to the ground or close together without wind shear causing upsets, but no matter for that section of the film I was transfixed.
The film is very easy on the Japanese who were a fascist military dictatorship who did after all attack without declaring war and whilst still talking peace.
Some gripes, the whole cinema here laughed when (over a siren sounding the all clear not the alert) the newsreel spoke of Hitler's Luftwaffe bombing 'downtown London' (it just sounds very odd to British ears), Roosevelt's cabinet members talked of giving aid to Russia before it was in the war (the US did give the UK help before it joined the war but made us pay handsomely for it) and I just couldn't get Ewen Bremner's 'Trainspotting' role out of my mind when seeing him in this. This was the first and probably last raid there ever was on US citizens in what was very nearly US territory, but I think US audiences should remember London had raids like this almost daily in 1940/41 and continuing for years after (the last German bomb to fall on London was in March 1945!).
If you go to this with the right attitude of healthy scepticism and an ear for irony (not something our American counsins are always good at)you'll probably have a good time. If not, for European audiences it is far too cloyingly sentimental. Voight will probably get Best Supporting Oscar for Roosevelt though.
*Possible Spoiler*

More than a few of the London audience fell about laughing at the end when Affleck came out of the plane and looked back to let his eyes follow a coffin out of the plane. To his credit he looked as if he was having difficulty keeping a straight face too...........