Review: The Monuments Men

Monuments Men, the new movie directed by and starring George Clooney, is out on Friday. I joined many of you last night at the Regal Cinema North Hills for a sneak peek.

You can watch the trailer above, or I can summarize it for you here:  the movie is based on a book, which chronicles the true story of a platoon of guys who are art scholars and the like who go into Europe during World War II to rescue, recover, and return stolen works of art from all across Europe.  It is described on IMDB.com as "an action drama." It was supposed to premiere, at least in some theaters, before the end of 2013 so that it could be considered for an Oscar.  It was moved out of "Oscar Season" to February, and after seeing it I know why.

The movie, which features no less than 4 Oscar winners and one Oscar nominated actor, has a huge cast.  It's like Ocean's Eleven, but during World War II.  Because the cast is so huge, you never get to actually get to know any one of the characters, not even Clooney's own (seemingly) main character, Frank Stokes.  None of the storylines or even some backstory are really fleshed out.  Therefore, when a character (spoiler alert!) dies, you aren't that invested in them anyway.  I actually found myself guessing when some characters would bite it in the film.


The movie itself jumps around a lot, and I think it has to do with the fact that the cast is huge and everyone needs some sort of screen time.  As a result, it felt sort of incongruent and sometimes confusing.  I mentioned before that IMDB calls it "an action drama."  I brought that up because I couldn't figure out while watching it whether the movie was an action film, a drama, or was a comedic drama.  The Monuments Men does all of those things and does none of them well.  The jokes felt forced, and when a dramatic moment was coming, (spoiler alert, again!) like when Stokes and his gang find barrels of gold that turn out to be gold teeth taken from Jewish people at concentration camps, you not only figured out that there were teeth in the barrels, but you kind of saw it coming.  You're not that invested in the drama part anyway, because you keep waiting for the laugh. And, the action. There really isn't much at all.

To sum up:  I can see why The Monuments Men was moved from Oscar Season.  It wasn't a bad  film, per se.  But it certainly wasn't good. If I were to give it a grade, I'd go with C+.

Alli


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