London - British critics laid into Hollywood for rewriting history in Pearl Harbor - but it still made £3 million in its first weekend at the UK box office.
"It is a crude travesty of the actual events. It is a lump of pure idiocy," the Daily Telegraph critic, Andrew O'Hagan said. "It is a piece of war pornography."
The Herald said the threehour epic starring Kate Beckinsale and Ben Affleck was "a contemptuous, pumped-up, one-note, flag-waving, shampoo-and-testosterone fabrication".