Allied

I was mildly intrigued by the trailer for 2016's ALLIED, but every time I thought about watching it, something held me back.  Some unexplainable gut feeling. You've had them.  Not just about movies.  I'm not always right about such things, but I sensed something wasn't quite there with this one, a contemporary effort to recreate that old mid twentieth century Hollywood magic.  With a story involving romance and possible espionage with a WWII setting in Europe, how could it miss?

It does, and describing why may not be so easy.  The production design is expectedly handsome.  Don Burgess' cinematography is crisp.  The actors, led by Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, are attractive.  Steven Knight's serviceable screenplay has all the elements necessary for this sort of movie: witty, playful banter, sleazily smiling villains, action set pieces, tense interrogations, attempted traps to get someone suspected of not being who they say they are to give themselves away, etc.  The culprit for ALLIED's failure may be Robert Zemeckis, the film's director.  I'm still a fan of many of his movies (mainly pre-2004) but here his infatuation with technology and perhaps his lack of skills with strong drama undo what could've been a nice, more authentic seeming retro pleasure.

Plot: 1942.  Canadian Air Force pilot Max (Pitt) joins forces with Marianne, a resistance fighter from France (Cotillard), to assassinate a German ambassador in Casablanca.  They pose as husband and wife and, at first, curb their hormones knowing that such involvement can compromise the mission and get one killed.  The plan goes off swimmingly.  Max and Marianne consummate their lust in a car during a sandstorm.  But they are also in love, and Max proposes. They move to London and have a child.

Time goes by, and Max's superiors begin to believe Marianne is a spy for the Germans, one who assumed the identity of a woman who died in France.  Of course Max does not believe this.  But then he begins noticing his wife having conversations at parties with strange men who walk away as he approaches.  Max begins his own investigation.  Will loyalties be tested?

ALLIED is a curiously flat motion picture.  Some of the blame rests on Pitt's weary, possibly disinterested performance.  He may look the part (and he's done his share of WWII pics), but his heart doesn't seem to be in it.  I also expected to hear him lapse into his rag tag character from INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS at any moment, which turned this movie into an unintended comedy.  Cotillard, who does generate some heat with her co-star, fares much better, and gives the film a certain bid for legitimacy in evoking old time entertainments.  She also makes the very last moments of this movie ring with some emotion.

The CGI sandstorm is a real low point.  Some of the other effects do nothing to serve this story and often create an artificiality.  Zemeckis once admitted he preferred pop entertainments like James Bond films to more serious French dramas, but ALLIED doesn't seem to work on any conceivable level for more than a few minutes at a time.  His past movies were more successful in evoking fantastic, wondrous ideas about earlier eras in history, but here the attempt to feel more realistic mixed with yesteryear Hollywood studio fare seems out of his grasp.  As does his efforts to create a romance for the ages.  To quote an IMDB poster, "CASABLANCA, this ain't."