How can I help you steal our stolen art?

The Monuments Men

(2014)

How do you end up making a movie with a cast and premise this good so goddamn boring? I had hopes for The Monuments Men, based on both those good solid reasons; it was in my films to see for both 2013 and this year, even though I should have heeded the warning signs when the release date was delayed. After all, it couldn’t be anything but at very least entertaining. Could it? Unfortunately this is George Clooney the director in complete disarray, clueless over to how to string a plot together (with co-writer and frequent collaborator Grant Heslov) and inept at introducing any kind of pace, urgency or drama into his filmmaking. He’s not even that endearing in his familiar anchoring star turn.

He and Heslov previously teamed on Good Night, and Good Luck and The Ides of March, both buoyed somewhat by having a politically invested Clooney (even if his points are relatively soft and familiar ones). Heslov also directed Gorgeous George in the oft chastised but actually quite enjoyable The Men Who Stare at Goats (the ending stinks, and the attempts to string Jon Ronson’s episodic journalistic tome/TV series into a coherent narrative are patchy at best, but there’s enough offbeat goodness in there to satisfy). You can quite see why they snapped up the rights to The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M Edsel but even the title of his true tale of the quest to find art treasures looted by the Nazis is more exciting than their “dramatisation”.

Perhaps there was no story to muster? The hunt of the title was merely a misnomer, and the Yanks just fell upon the art as fortuitously as they do in the movie. In which case, Clooney and Heslov should probably have dispensed with any pretence towards fidelity and made something up with the loosest of connections to the historical subject matter. At least the result might have been involving. You’ve got a load of bumbling old duffers inept at any attempts to engage in warfare? Watch some old episodes of Dad’s Army for inspiration, Grant and George; the box set is pretty cheap these days. Stuck for how to make a quest for treasure colourful? How about Kelly’s Heroes or (George’s own) Three Kings?

It seems not. Clooney and Heslov are caught in the trap of earnest respectfulness, when what this needed may have been outright irreverence. At every turn (or exceedingly slow sideways movement) they sink into a mire of lumpenly saluting these brave men but forget to make them in any way brave or charismatic. How could you not want to spend time in the company of John Goodman, Jean Dujardin and Bill Murray? Bill Murray! Usually Murray’s dryness invites the viewer in on the joke. Here it’s a sign of how disenchanted he is with the whole enterprise. Or maybe, as he has said, he had a ruddy good time. It just doesn’t translate to the viewer.

I don’t think the serious-funny push-pull (depending on how you believe, the delayed release reflects the tonal struggle or incomplete special efects) is nearly as problematic as how inert The Monuments Men is structurally. At no point is any momentum built up. Every single (traditionally successful) plot device falls flat on its face; rounding up the usual suspects, sending the unprepared recruits into a war zone, splitting them up for their individual missions, then the race (read, sedate stroll) against time to get hold of the goodies before the damn Russkies. It could be a charmless affair but still tell an intriguing story, but there’s nothing to fire the mind.

The philosophical points are beaten out with all the subtlety of a claw hammer on the cranium, so much so that, come the final scene, we even get the President directly asking Lieutenant Clooney the very dilemma George has been repeatedly mulling throughout (is art worth a man’s life?) This, without naming names, comes up because a couple of top chaps are dispensed by the terrible Boche. The incidents themselves lack any impact, but we’re asked to mourn these men and believe that the remaining group are terribly affected by their loss. Just so we’re sure of this, the truly rotten score by Alexandre Desplat tries to stir the emotions. For the rest of the time Desplat follows the most hackneyed, militaristic drumroll.

Surely if you’re going to make a movie about the importance of art you need to instil an appreciation of the same? There has to be awe, and wonder, and beauty. You never once believe that any of these guys give a shit about paintings. Murray only wakes up when he finds an immense cache of gold (any hope that his scene at the dentist will find him reliving his cameo in Little Shop of Horrors quickly evaporates, and Stripes is a lifetime away). As does Clooney the director momentarily, which tells you a lot about where the guy who thinks the Elgin Marbles should be returned to the Pantheon (sic) has his priorities. Even Cate Blanchett, in an utterly thankless supporting role as a frumpy secretary with a yen for Matt Damon’s man sandwich, seems more preoccupied with loathing her occupiers (she’s French, but Clooney must not have been interested in employing a genuine croissant enthusiast) than expressing her love of the old masters. Clooney and Heslov set as the great prize Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child but this pursuit is as lifeless as the sculpture itself. Phedon Papamichael’s cinematography is sometimes quite pretty, but that’s about as artistic as this movie gets.

The attempts to make Damon the butt of jokes (he’s really crap at French) make you long for the days of Ocean’s 11 and, while it’s nice to see Bob Balaban in a high profile role, his pairing with Murray never really sparks. It’s still more amenable than Goodman and Dujardin, between whom there is zero chemistry. Hugh Bonneville is a complete bore, but he’s in Downton Abbey so that puts him on any anglophile’s casting list. Apart from him and Jean, the Allies = the Americans. Which is obviously the case, as anyone who’s seen U-571 and Saving Private Ryan knows. The Germans and Russians are all faceless goons (Dimitri Leonidas’ “good German” aside). A scene where a Nazi officer is discovered posing as a civilian, “fakes” adorning the walls of his house, briefly threatens to become dramatic but quickly resumes the picture’s otherwise listless form.

Somehow The Monuments Men hasn’t completely tanked. Itmay be set to take up residence alongside Leatherheads as stillborn Clooney picture, but it wont stop studios giving him the greenbacks to make more. It says something about the lack of achievement here that you’re left idly contemplating how, if the Nazis had destroyed all that art, at least we wouldn’t have had to sit through this movie.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

This guy’s armed with a hairdryer.

An Innocent Man (1989) (SPOILERS) Was it a chicken-and-egg thing with Tom Selleck and movies? Did he consistently end up in ropey pictures because other, bigger big-screen stars had first dibs on the good stuff? Or was it because he was a resolutely small-screen guy with limited range and zero good taste? Selleck had about half-a-dozen cinema outings during the 1980s, one of which, the very TV, very Touchstone Three Men and a Baby was a hit, but couldn’t be put wholly down to him. The final one was An Innocent Man , where he attempted to show some grit and mettle, as nice-guy Tom is framed and has to get tough to survive. Unfortunately, it’s another big-screen TV movie.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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