Film - Charlotte Raven watches the latest Hollywood blockbuster crash and burn

You spend the first half of Pearl Harbor waiting for the bombs to drop. Minute after agonising minute goes by before the reassuring hum of the Jap planes brings the hope of redemption from a story so silly that it makes the whole thing look like a spoof. No amount of period detail, or wealth of lavishly varnished shots, can compensate for the problems caused to this epic love story by the crazy innovation of having a heroine who would give up everything to spend her life with either of the two male leads.

Kate Beckinsale plays Evelyn Johnson, a Persil-white uniformed nurse, who is a model of 1940s propriety in everything but her ability to cheat fate by shifting her romantic allegiance when the war interrupts her ambitions. Her first love, the fighter pilot Rafe McCawley, is a one-in-a-million kind of guy who woos her with a romantic range limited to "God, you're pretty". They knock around for a bit, until his reckless determination to find himself a patch of sky on which the war is really taking place - "I'm not anxious to die, sir, I'm just anxious to matter" - results in him being shot down over England. Presuming him dead, Evelyn notes the bleak realities of combat and takes up with his best mate, Danny Walker. Rafe returns to find them an item, reconciles himself to the situation and then, after an interlude in which 3,000 of their friends and colleagues are killed by Japanese bombers, it's all change again. Danny is killed in action and Rafe, knowing that Evelyn is pregnant, gallantly assumes his old position.

By this time, no one gives two hoots what becomes of any of the characters. The trouble with having a heroine who has no preference as to who she ends up with is that the audience couldn't care less, either. In flipping from one man to the other, Evelyn robs us of the capacity to cherish her suitors' lives. If loss is just a temporary inconvenience, what does it matter if one of them goes down? And why should we be any more upset if a couple of fleets of Rafes and Dannys are wiped out by the Japs at Pearl Harbor? Once they have sacrificed emotional engagement so that Evelyn can have her cake and eat it, the directors are stuck with an audience whose only interest in the big set pieces is how they compare to the sinking ship scenes in Titanic. Judged by this paltry criterion, Pearl Harbor is still second-rate. For all the money thrown at it, the central bombing sequence is weirdly unimpressive. There is too much composition. The explosions have that comic-book effect of scattering people evenly across the frame, with one or two in the foreground to enhance the sense of perspective. Effective as they look from an aesthetic point of view, they lack any visceral impact. Instead of thinking "Wow!", you end up trying to work out which of the casualties is digitally generated.

I never did this in Titanic because, as corny and dopey as that film was, it at least managed to make you feel that something big was happening. The bigness of Pearl Harbor, by contrast, never converts into grandeur. Scale does not equal significance, and the geek's cache of statistics that can be found in the production notes - 4,000 gallons of gasoline to ignite the six ships!; and 7,000 sticks of dynamite!; and 2,000 feet of something called prima cord! - adds up to nothing more than a big firework display, which, like all firework displays, is over far too quickly.

Bang! Bang! it all goes, and then, 20 minutes later, it's on with the cornball dialogue and the inevitable face-saving bombing exercise to prove that the Americans aren't pussies after all. "I fear all we have done is awakened a sleeping giant," says the Japanese commander, just in case we thought that failing to detect a fleet of hostile aircraft until they were overhead said anything about the US's military competence. Everyone laughed when he said this. For a supposedly serious film, there are a great many laughs in Pearl Harbor. The romantic exchanges are brilliantly pedestrian - all the lead characters sound as if they are on their lunch break. "I didn't even know you hadn't died until the day you turned up alive, and then all this happened." That's Evelyn to Rafe, and the "all this" she's referring to, which sounds like some minor bother with malfunctioning office equipment, is the epochal and personally devastating bombing raid - the same raid that causes a crippled FDR to rise out of his wheelchair and walk when one of his minions suggests that the payback sortie to Japan is militarily impossible. "Mr President, what you're suggesting can't be done." "Don't tell me what can't be done," says Roosevelt, staggering to his feet to secure assent for a raid that will do for Danny and give Rafe the chance to get the shag he honourably turned down when he left Evelyn the first time round. "Don't die, Danny," he says unconvincingly. "Why not?" we think.

Pearl Harbor (12) is on general release

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