One star

NO wonder this over-long war 'epic' bombed at the box office.

The cast, including Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin, Josh Hartnett, Cuba Gooding Jnr and our own Kate Beckinsale, must have known they were on a suicide mission when they read the lamentable script.

To be fair, they do the best they can as the clichs rain down, causing devastation but missing the target.

It is commendable to bring history to a new generation. But director Michael Bray's pop video style and computer game graphics were better employed in Armageddon.

The movie comes in three parts.

There's the love story, which is so cumbersome it takes the viewer from here to eternity and back.

There's the surprise attack on December 7, 1941, filmed more in the vein of Titanic.

Then there's America's heroic revenge attack on Tokyo but portrayed here as sheer post-Vietnam Yankee-Doodle-Dandyism.

Anyone wanting an intelligent film version of these events must return to the 1970 seminal work Tora! Tora! Tora!

This is not just Hollywood v History, it's a desecration of war graves.

PGW