The cinematic equivalent of defacing a war memorial

Rating: 2/10 (7 June 2001)

This honestly has to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Never mind the plagiarism of other, better movies; the empty-headed and monumentally annoying love story; the pathetic so-called "acting" (only Dan Aykroyd and Tom Sizemore make any sort of impact); the banal script and laughable dialogue; the cheesy music and rock video editing; or the gee-whizz attitude to violence and explosions. What really galls about this turkey is its offensiveness: surely none of the poor souls who perished at Pearl Harbor behaved as stupidly as portrayed here!
One scene sums up Jerry Bruckheimer, Randall Wallace, and Michael Bay's attitude in making this film. While military personnel and civilians are bombed and blasted, raked with gunfire, drowned and crushed in a sickeningly titillating way (whoever described this as war as pornography was spot on!), the filmmakers are more concerned with the plight of a small dog whose owner has just been shot. When the pooch is rescued, the obvious intent was for a heartwarming moment; but this was the moment at which this trash went from being extraordinarily dumb to being extraordinarily infuriating. Thousands of people dying, but we are expected to relate to a bloody dog!!!
Who are these people? I agree that there is a place for mindless action movies and a comic book approach to violence. But when you impose such an approach on what should have been a human (not to mention, humane) drama, evoking the terror of war and remembering, respectfully, the memory of those who sacrificed everything in one of the great turning points of 20th century history, I'm afraid that you have lost the plot in a big, big way.
The shame of it is that, given the budget and the resources at their disposal, Bruckheimer and co have missed a golden opportunity to present a really memorable, classic, and respectful motion picture. But, as they count their earnings, I am more than confident that making such a movie was the last thing they ever intended.
Cynical, mawkish, cliched rubbish of the highest order, this is the cinematic equivalent of defacing a war memorial.