Allied review

Well went to see that new Robert Zemeckis film that is just out, Allied, a romantic wartime drama starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as a couple who meet during the 2nd World War but all is not what they seem....

So I won't do a full indepth review with lots of quotes of dialogue so instead I will keep it quite short (honest!) but I will say a bit about the plot so there might be the odd SPOILER ahead but I will try and keep that to minimum too.

So with that in mind here is the usual warning...

A FEW SPOILERS ARE AHEAD BUT NOT TOO MANY!! 

STORY 

Right so the story is set during World War II and begins in 1942 with a Canadian assassin, Max Vatan (Pitt) meeting with a French resistance fighter, Marianne Beausejour (Cotillard) as the two of them join up to assassinate a German official in Casablanca.  And as the two of them get to know each other they begin to fall in love.  Max and Marianne soon also carry out their mission to kill the German official, which succeeds and they manage to escape undetected and after this Max proposes to Marianne who accepts.

The story then switches to London a few weeks later where Marianne gains asylum and the two of them get married and settle down and have a baby daughter, Anna.  However just as they seem happy and content in their lives, Max receives word from his superiors at the SOE (Special Operations Executive) about something that will have a drastic change on their lives.....

THOUGHTS

Allied as a film largely succeeds in being a wartime thriller as some of its setpieces and its action work very well and Zemeckis does an expert job at building up the tension in these scenes.  However it does at times threaten to bog itself down with the usual kind of sentimentality we are used to seeing in Zemeckis's films.  But despite this the film is still quite enjoyable and for the most part it moves along at a decent pace.

PERFORMANCES 

Performance wise, Allied is very good and the two leads of Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard work well together and have a somewhat understated chemistry although this could be more on Brad's part than Marion given that he plays his character in a rather cool, suave yet subdued manner.  This in fact threatens to kind of detract from any chemistry that the two actors might appear to have for each other onscreen.

Brad himself more specifically does play things pretty cool here and he keeps his dialogue also quite terse and brief but he does succeed in showing that Max can be both suave but also ruthless and clinical in his job when he has to be.  Although if there is one thing you could say about Brad's performance is that at the start of the film he sure doesn't fit in as a posing Frenchman as he's about as far from a Frenchman as you could get (even something Marianne alludes to when she mentions his less than perfect French accent!).

Regardless of this though Brad, shows once again that even at the age of 52 he still cuts the figure of the leading star very well and has aged better than Tom Cruise has!

As for Marion her performance is excellent throughout and she plays Marianne mostly as a carefree party-goer on the outside but also as a calculating assassin on the other who is far from what she seems.  And I won't say anymore about her character plot wise than that as I don't want to give away the rest of the plot!

Marion also does manage to make her character likeable and later on when things turn somewhat sour for them she does succeed in making you feel sorry for Marianne.  So overall her performance is definitely the best one in the film.

DIRECTOR AND MUSIC

As for the direction, well like I said, Robert Zemeckis does a good job here for the most part as he keeps the pacing fairly tight and the film's runtime of just over two hours is about right and he also handles the film's action very well.  Zemeckis also deserves credit for depicting quite a few of the scenes in French using subtitles for the audiences rather than have all the dialogue in English.

Moving onto the music well no points for guessing who did the score.....yep, it was Bob's regular composer, Alan Silvestri, who here has composed a fairly pleasant and inoffensive score that mainly suits the film's tone.  The only problem for me though with Silvestri's music is that its pretty repetitive and identifiable in its use of signature themes and orchestrations as he often uses the same sounding piano and strings arrangements that kind of shows a lack of individuality for most of his more recent scores and this is definitely the case here.

FLAWS (Warning this section may contain the odd spoiler!)

As for Allied's flaws....yeah its not quite a perfect film and for starters I think one of the problems I had with it is that the film towards the end really does take a strong sentimental tack, which kind of threatened to ruin it for me personally.  And this is often the case with Zemeckis films as sooner or later you are reminded that it is indeed a Zemeckis film you are watching as you are bound to get some sentimentality thrown in somewhere!

Another issue was possibly also to do with the timeline of the war as in one scene in London we see the city being bombed above in aerial assault.  Now in the film's timeline this may have been around late 1943 or early 1944 so this definitely meant the timeline is askew in the film as the Battle of Britain or the "Blitz" as it was commonly known lasted from September 1940 to May 1941 so by this time there should have been no aerial attacks over London!

And lastly I have to ask the question and its kind of spoiler so: SPOILER ALERT!! How did Max and Marianne manage to drive their car up onto the sand dunes??  I mean sand dunes can be pretty deep so I'd imagine if they parked their car in one it would be pretty difficult for them to drive back out of one!

Not only that in this scene (ANOTHER SPOILER!!) Max and Marianne have sex for the first time and they do it during a very rough sandstorm which rocks the car violently while they do their own rockin (sorry couldn't resist!).  Now I'm surprised that the sandstorm wouldn't have done even more extensive damage to the car itself and not only that they would also somehow be able to just magically drive the car out of there without getting even more stuck in the sand!

Anyway that's it for the flaws.

SUM UP

So to sum up, Allied is an entertaining and even at times gripping romantic wartime thriller which has its moments of charm and features nice performances from the two leads in Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard.  And yes OK the film does have some plot issues and it does feel a bit too sentimental toward the end but if you can forgive that then its still a film that might be worth a look.

Anyway so that's it for now and I will be back on here hopefully with another post just before the end of the month.

So till the next un its bye for now!