Not as good as I expected

Rating: 7/10 (7 October 2001)

"Pearl Harbor" comes off like "Titanic" meets "Tora! Tora! Tora!". It's a three hour epic that has shades of those two movies, and in the end I was kind of disappointed. This film should have been better than it turned out to be. The big problem with this film is the director, Michael Bay. Bay directed this film pretty much the same way he directed his last film "Armageddon", sloppy and inconsistent. With the exception of the Pearl Harbor attack sequence which is excellently done, most of the scenes before that attack come off as corny and ridiculous. And the love triangle between Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Beckinsale doesn't even stand up to the love story between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in "Titanic". However, the big scene when Pearl Harbor comes under attack is a tour-de-force sequence. The special effects are superb and horrifying. But just think at how much better this film could have been. If Steven Spielberg or James Cameron had directed this, "Pearl Harbor" would have been a much better film. Spielberg and Cameron are directing geniuses compared to Bay, who foolishly tries to integrate comic relief in the first part of the film which comes off ineptly silly. But he's got the special effects in the right place. So all-in-all, I was kind of disappointed with "Pearl Harbor", the film that was predicted to be the biggest hit of summer 2001, but ended up being a slight box office disappointment (at the time of this review the movies' gross was at $197 million, still below $200 million). It's not an awful film, but it could have been better.
**1/2 (out of four)