Went to see the new Brad Pitt WW2 spy flick Allied over the weekend. This is the new flick by Robert Zemeckis though it doesn’t really feel like it. This is the dude who directed Back to the Future, The Polar express, Cast Away, Forest Gump, The Walk, and Beowulf. None of his filmography suggests he’d make a deliberately paced 1940s era flashback movie with a sedate old-time pace. But he did make it and I’m curious to see how the movie plays in black & white. I guess I’m suggesting this movie is rather slow and maybe a little dull.
The premise, which is greatly spoiled by the trailers, is that Brad Pitt is a super spy for the American air force working for the Brits. He parachutes into Casablanca (no accidental reference to a classic movie there) and meets up with his female counterpart played by Marion Cotillard. They pull off a daring anti-Nazi mission, fall in love, get married, move to London during the Blitz, and then things go sideways when the British spy service makes an accusation about her that he cannot believe.
The movie lives or dies on whether or not Pitt and Cotillard have chemistry and they kinda don’t. I guess its well acted enough but I didn’t feel the heat between them and this is even with a sex scene in a car in the middle of a sandstorm in one seriously overwrought sequence that made me laugh. Unintentionally.
Then there are moments that kind of silly where Pitt has to investigate something and it involves the French resistance, a drunk prisoner, and a bunch of German soldiers out on the town… It’s all kind of over the top and feels like the studio was in a panic that there wasn’t enough Nazi gunfights in their WW2 pic.
All that said, the final twenty minutes were pretty suspenseful and very well acted. I guess to the extent that I was into it proves that maybe the chemistry was there after all? I dunno – but that final sequence was good enough to make me grudgingly recommend the movie. Just go in knowing this is not an action packed extravaganza and, in fact, might be a little too slow for its own good.
Score: 75