Allied

Year: 2016

Genre: Drama

Directed: Robert Zemeckis

Stars: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Vincent Ebrahim, Camille Cottin, August Diehl, Lizzy Caplan, Sally Messham, Daniel Betts, Matthew Goode, Simon McBurney, Marion Bailey,

Production: GK Films

I’m not sure which is worse: a bad story made passable by impossibly qualified talents or the fact that said talents thought something this dated and superfluous could have been a homerun. The feel of Allied is downright quixotic. It’s an English Patient (1996) knockoff with the look of a cheap wartime propaganda movie starring the closet thing we have to classic Hollywood stars playing our leads. The story itself creaks with outdated maudlin cliches while the camera traverses each moment like it’s trying to draw attention to itself but none of what it captures catches the eye. I realize that director Robert Zemeckis is the Amblin wunderkind that churned out Back to the Future (1985) but couldn’t we have please left this outmoded way of making films in the past?

 

Get in Marty! We're fighting Nazis!

Pitt and Cotillard play fellow spies Max Vatan and Marianne Beausejour, called into service during the onslaught of WWII. Beausejour has spent years in the French underground gaining a reputation for being as unscrupulous and deadly as she is beautiful. Meanwhile Vatan an agent for…whatever Canada’s equivalent is for the CIA, drops from the sky and assimilates into the Vichy intrigue of Casablanca. From there they pair off, fall in love, move to England and, as you can no doubt gleam from the trailer, Vatan and company begin to suspect Beausejour of being an Axis double agent.

Violence and betrayal huh...

The film is divided almost perfectly in half between our duos mission and eventual courtship in Morocco, and the percolating intrigue back at HQ. So much of the film’s stock is governed by the tension created by Beausejour’s situation in the second half that it’s amazing the film takes so long to get there. Once we finally get there however, the movie tips its hat one too many times all but giving away the game before it even begins. So many of the scenes shot in the English countryside are shot through mirrors (a Zemeckis staple that hammers in the idea of someone being two-faced). The dialogue rehashes moments from the first half of the film as if to create a cleaver-than-thou echo; and if you’re not already primed for the plot twist, at one point Beausejour is reading Brighton Rock. That in congress with the fact that her name is a French double f***ing entendre you just have to assume she’s not telling the whole story.

It’s so mind-boggling how a movie of such pedigree can be so flaccid and obtuse yet there it is, still in theaters and still selling the faces of its two leads like their Leigh and Olivier. Look forward to this uneven little spy thriller to be cobbled into a four pack with Red Tails (2012), Defiance (2008) and Valkyrie (2008) because that’s the only way spending money on this would be a smart buy.

Final Grade: D