PEARL HARBOR

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay specialize in loud, dizzy, thinly-characterized action movies for teenage boys, and Pearl Harbor is no exception. In this case they have a particularly hackneyed script to work from, courtesy of Randall Wallace (Braveheart).

The movie's about Ben Affleck--at his jerkiest--and Josh Hartnett as two navy pilots who are best buds, playing chicken with airplanes. (Is that even possible? Is it hard for planes to aim at each other in the air?) Affleck is also in love with nurse Kate Beckinsale, but not enough to prevent him from leaving to join a squadron of pilots fighting for the freedom of the world in the Battle of Britain. The movie, of course, is careful not to mention that at this point most Americans preferred to hide behind arrogant neutrality, and Hitler had to declare war on them. Some heroes!

Then Affleck goes MIA and gets reported dead, so Becky finds consolation in Hartnett's arms and gets knocked up. Then Affleck comes back from the dead and gives Becky the surprise of her life. (It goes without saying that he doesn't wire ahead with news of his return, lest Becky be less shocked when she sees him in person.) Affleck and Hartnett--spoiler alert!--get into a fist fight.

Further trouble beckons, in the form of Admiral Yamamoto.  He's played by the great Japanese actor Ken Watanabe, who'll never win an Oscar: the Academy just doesn't appreciate the subtle below-the-surface acting that east Asians are capable of. (They prefer someone like Denzel Washington in Training Day, where you can tell exactly what he's like from the first moment you see him. Or at least that's what my sister told me; life is too short for me to see it.) He has the movie's only good line: "A brilliant man would find a way not to fight a war."

Yamamoto--spoiler alert!--sends a squadron to raid Pearl Harbor and cause lots of death and destruction and cool explosions.  Affleck and Harnett play their chicken game with the enemy, but this time it makes them heroes or something.  Nurse Becky becomes a heroine too.  Another hero in the raid is an underappreciated black sailor who shoots down some planes, a humorless one-note role for Cuba Gooding.  Lots and lots of heroes.

Then Alec Baldwin as Jimmy Doolittle organizes a big raid on Tokyo: "It'll only be a pinprick... but it'll be straight through their hearts." (So why didn't the Pacific war end right then, instead of dragging on for three long years?) There's a hilarious scene where he tells his pilots something like "Half of you will die if you go on this mission. If you still want to participate, take a step forward." In the movie, they all step forward. In the version I'd like to see, they all run out the back exits and Baldwin yells "Pussies!"

Then there's some Doolittle Raid stuff, Hartnett dies heroically (and loudly), and Affleck marries Becky and they raise Hartnett's baby. This movie came out in the summer of 2001, about the same time as Washington D.C. unveiled that grandiosely insecure World War II memorial, which always reminds me of a Soviet monument. Then a few months later came 9/11, so they re-released the movie to appeal to the combination of self-pity and self-congratulation and superficial flag-waving that was engulfing the United States then. Goodness knows, there are none of Yamamoto's brilliant men leading 21st-century America.