Sixty Years Later Bombs Are Still Being Dropped

Rating: Null/10 (4 June 2001)

Once upon a time there were three little actors who joined the US armed forces. They were each assigned very hazardous duties and lots of cliched dialogue. But I took them away from all that and now they work for me. My name is Bruckheimer, and I call these kids my puppets...
Wow, this film really isn't very good. I have a feeling that Bruckheimer saw Saving Private Ryan, thought "I could do that!", tried to and didn't quite succeed, largely because like all his films, this one is about style over substance.
Basically, it goes like this. First of all, there's an hour of agonisingly turgid love story, complete with ridiculous soap twists (Ben Affleck's dead! No! He's Alive! But his best friend and his girlfriend have hooked up! And she's pregnant!) Then the agonisingly turgid love story is put on hold for forty minutes while stuff blows up. Then it comes back into play again. More stuff blows up and the agonisingly turgid love story is resolved in a cliched ending which is telegraphed from about an hour before it happens.

The beginning of the film just reminded me over and over of Charlie's Angels. It's ridiculously stylish. It's all about a trio of perfectly pretty people and they do melodramatic stuff. Then when we get to the action part, it looks great. But it feels like it's wandered in from some sort of IMAX Pearl Harbour documentary, while the early part of the film belongs to the Turgid Romance genre.
Plus the dialogue is hillarious, it's so corny. Poor Alec Baldwin, EVERY SINGLE LINE of his is a solemn cliche. And excuse me, but Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett are supposed to be the same age? Whatever.