ON the sleepy Sunday morning of December 7 1941, children played, families prayed, and squadrons of Japanese warplanes screamed across the skies of an Hawaiian paradise to launch a surprise attack on the USA's battle divisions at Pearl Harbour (or Harbor, if they insist).

The Hollywood action team of producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay has now poured as much planning and, who knows, probably more money into re-creating that dark day in American history, turning it into a tale of war and love, just as James Cameron's Titanic laced its re-telling of that ocean liner's icy nocturnal catastrophe with teasing pulp-fiction romance.

Tinseltown can't bring itself to tell it straight without a sweetener. Consequently, as with Titanic, the successor to the crown of the world's most expensive movie becomes two films within one, to its detriment because the script inevitably isn't up to the task.

Yet again, an epic movie ends up a farrago of comic-book clichs, in which ridiculously handsome best friends fall for the same girl, fall out but still find time to single-handedly win the Second World War and stuff those "Jap suckers".

In a long lead-in to an over-long war movie, director Bay introduces those childhood friends and all-American flying aces: Tennessee crop duster's son Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck, out of his shallow acting depth) and the sweeter Danny Walker (the cigarette card-faced Josh Hartnett). Both are fixated with plucky nurse Evelyn Johnson (English rose Kate Beckinsale, apparently chosen because we Brits look more old-fashioned, whereas Renee Zellweger looks so now, so London, so Bridget Jones in the twisted logic of movie-making).

Little time is given over to Japan's motives for bombing Pearl Harbor - presumably too dull for the popcorn masses - and Britain's only contribution to the war effort is to send seconded fighter pilot Affleck back to America with the commendation: "If there are many more like you back home, God help anyone who goes to war with the Americans". (Obviously the Vietnamese didn't get the message).

Pearl Harbor best marshals its resources for the Japanese air attack: Bruckheimer and Bay know how to film the apocalyptic and the explosive, having made The Rock and Armageddon, and the harbour battle scenes match those past pyrotechnic displays, without rivalling Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan for shocking impact.

There is a brief moment of grace, a slow camera shot through the carnage to a requiem mass accompaniment, but Hollywood tradition insists on the inevitable American comeback in Rocky style, and so the trite tone returns.

For proof of where this film's heart really lies, look at the receptacles into which Affleck and Hartnett give their blood: two Coca Cola bottles. When product placement meets history: it's not the real thing.