 | |
|
|
 |
review by Luca Brasi
Full Review List
|
|
Movie
Pearl Harbour DANNY: I think World War II just started! Aaah, such wit is genius! It's great to see a brilliant blockbuster comedy make us all laugh heartily, and "Pearl Harbour" does the job brilliantly. This screwball comedy is hilarious from beginning to end. Ben Affleck shows off those comic skills he honed in "Dogma" and "Shakespeare In Love" like a master, being as monotonous and silly as possible, satirizing the charcters of old war movies brilliantly. There's not a scene with him that didn't make the audience chuckle. Anyway, the hilarious story- granted, it might seem incredibly predictable, cheesy and pretentious, but as long as you remember it's a comedy, you're fine. Rafe and Danny are two Tennessee boys who dream of being pilots, and in training school they get up to some whacky hi-jinks before Rafe is asked to help out the RAF and Danny is shipped off to Pearl Harbour Naval base. No great comedy is complete without a funny lady, and the english Kate Beckinsale is exceptionally witty, making her speech as soppy and melodramatic as possible and slipping in and out of an American accent for comic effect. Sadly, this is a war film and so they have to show off the darker side of war - you know, bombs and killing and such - so they get that over and done with as quick as possible, with little snippets of flying and a just-over-half-an-hour bombing segment. It's a shame that they show these very short bits, because they damper the rest of the comedy a bit, and they're used in the trailers, so a person could very easily get the wrong idea and think that this film is supposed to be an epic action-adventure war movie. Wait a minute. Hey, this is supposed to be an EPIC? Oh, Lord, what's wrong! I'm looking at the credits now; starring Ben Affleck, directed by Michael Bay, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer... just like that other "masterwork", ARMAGEDDON! Randall Wallace, out to prove that "Braveheart" was a fluke, has written a three-hour whimper of a film, with the least deep and most cliched charcters and plot points you can think of. The bombing scene is good, but short, and Ben Affleck in the RAF? The film makes it look like he won the Battle of Britain single-handedly! And what makes these few people so special? What about the hundreds of other people who took part in Pearl Harbour? Could they not find room for them in this THREE HOUR pile of cheese with the special effects equal to a playstation game? So many questions left unanswered. But I'll answer the following: Is "Pearl Harbour" worth your time, money or patience? NO. |