The never-ending Pearl Harbor

Rating: 3/10 (10 March 2011)

Pearl Harbor is Micheal Bay's parvum opus. Some say Transformers 2 is his parvum opus but I managed to enjoy that film. TF2 was a dumb action film and recognized itself as one, who can blame it? Pearl Harbor, however, is a dumb action film that thinks it's a gripping romantic epic when it fails at the latter while ending up exposing the former to the max.
Pearl Harbor tries to be Titanic. There's the cheesy script played by up-and-coming actors carrying a love story set during one of the biggest catastrophes in the first half of the 20th century. I find Titanic to be overrated but where it succeeded is where Pearl Harbor does an u-turn in the wrong direction. I hate Josh Hartsnett with a passion, so that's a minus for this film already. Our main leads are mediocre at very best and the dialogue is tremendously terrible. This really becomes a problem because they go through the same pretentious romantic dilemma again and again for what seems like an eternity. The action was fun...at first, but overstayed it's welcome since the action scenes too where drawn out as long as possible. The entire movie is the same repeated stuff over and over and over and over and it goes on for three hours! When the Pearl Harbor attack ended I expected the film to end, but no! It was still going! I had completely lost my attention at that point and curled in my couch waiting for the film to end. Thankfully once the douchebag Hartsnett's character dies the film goes through it's ending pretty quickly.
Some things work, most of it doesn't. It's a film that could have so easily been trimmed down an hour, because there is very little evidence that this film utilize a three hour length to it's advantage.
3/10