General News  25 2001  Movie reviews: "Pearl Harbor"  1:13pm EDT
Among the major U.S. newspapers, only the Los Angeles Times
gives Pearl Harbor a snappy salute. Curiously, the Times' review
is not written by lead critic Kenneth Turan but by the
newspaper's veteran movie writer, Kevin Thomas, whose taste in
films generally runs to independent and foreign-produced fare,
not big blockbusters. Thomas calls the film "a superb
reenactment" of the events of Dec. 7, 1941 that also provides
"an engaging love story" and reels off at "a brisk pace that
makes this three-hour war epic seem like half that time." The
filmmakers, he concludes, "have given us a Pearl Harbor to
remember." Compare those words with these of Glenn Whipp, film
critic for the cross-town Los Angeles Daily News: Director
Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have created a movie,
he writes, "that is so clichéd and boring that even the WB
television network would reject it out of hand for being too
insipid." Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post