The Monuments Men Review

I've been looking forward to George Clooney's latest directorial effort "The Monuments Men" for months now, even when it was scheduled for a December 2013 release. However it was pushed back and the reviews haven't been great. Here's my take...

The Monuments Men, directed by George Clooney, boats a terrific cast of actors including Clooney himself, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, John Goodman and others, and tells a true story based in World War 2. Clooney, a lover of art, decides to set up a small team of soldiers in an attempt to go behind enemy lines and reclaim stolen art from the Nazi's. Clooney states that if you destroy a person's art and culture, then it was as if they never existed, and that is what Hitler wants.

For me the Monuments Men never really came together and was a big disappointment. I don't hate the film by any stretch of the imagination, I feel frustrated because all of those talented people collaborating should have created something so much better than what they actually did.

The greatest flaw of the film is the connection we don't receive towards the main characters. All of the actors that play them are good in their roles and they're enjoyable to watch due to their famous egos and personalities, but I never saw them as characters. I knew hardly anything about any of them, besides the fact that they all like art! That lack of emotional connection really hurt the film when some of the emotional moments were happening, as they didn't really work.

Tonally, The Monuments Men suffers consistent inconsistencies. The transition between light-hearted dialogue scenes to "effective" emotional moments just doesn't work, meaning that one of the two tones feels completely out of place.

The film also suffers because it struggles to grasp time. The film chops from one scene to the next with a gap of 3 months, months that could have been used to flesh out characters to the point where we could make an attachment to the band of misfits.

The pacing is incredibly odd in that it feels incredibly slow and as a result, boring. The film takes forever to get going, and then it just never starts. The structure of the story is odd in that I would have rather seen them go after one big piece of art instead of the group splitting off and finding numerous pieces. An ultimate goal at the end of the movie which the characters were trying to pursue would have increased the tension and made the film feel more as if it had a purpose.

However as said before the actors are good in their roles and are very watchable. The music is good and technically its a well shot movie that does look good on screen. The movie does have good intentions and I can see why Clooney wanted to tell it, because the initial part of the story is intriguing. It's not a terrible film and large portions of it are watchable indeed, but as a whole the film never really comes together for me, which is a big shame:


Rating - C

1 sentence summary - Watchable, but numerous issues mean that the potential is never fully realised!


Thanks for reading,
Matt