An RAF officer learns his wife may be a Nazi spy.
Directed by: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Lizzy
Caplan, Charlotte Hope, Simon McBurney, Matthew Goode
Ask war veterans to sum up their experience and most will reply with a
variation on the theme of long stretches of boredom punctuated by the odd
burst of action. Such a description applies perfectly to
Robert Zemeckis' latest, WWII spy thriller Allied, which boasts a couple of standout set-pieces but is mostly a plodding
thriller that fails to engage.
Zemeckis' previous movie,
The Walk, was close to insufferable for most of its running time, saved in part by
a knockout final act. The reverse applies to Allied, an exciting 30 minute war movie followed by a dull 90 minutes.
That opening act introduces us to Brad Pitt's Max Vatan, a Canadian
airman working as a spy for the RAF. Due to his ability to speak French,
albeit in an unconvincing accent, he's parachuted into French Morocco where
he hooks up with renowned French resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour
(Marion Cotillard). Posing as man and wife, the two embark on a
dangerous mission to assassinate the German ambassador.
Zemeckis and screenwriter Steven Knight, whose script is based on
incidents in his own family history, suck us in with a very old-fashioned
romantic war thriller. But once Max and Marianne complete their mission and
become man and wife in London, a new plot takes over, and it's one Zemeckis
seems a lot less interested in.
Max is informed by his superiors in British Intelligence that they believe
Marianne is a Nazi spy. It seems highly improbable that they would inform
him of such knowledge, given they confess to not being entirely sure if Max
can be trusted himself. A far from foolproof plan to determine Marianne's
guilt is set in motion, with Max receiving a phone call and scribbling down
a message for his wife to see. Should the message be intercepted, Marianne
will be found guilty, and must be executed by Max himself. The unlikely
assumption that Max would write down the correct message is never
explained.
We're told Max will learn the truth on Monday, but we're never told how far
away Monday actually is, which saps away much of the potential for ticking
clock tension. I got the impression Max was being given a weekend to sweat
it out, but the plot drags on for what seems like a week or two.
Zemeckis fails to generate any suspense in the interactions between Max and
Marianne, with the pair spending too much time away from each other as Max
conducts a secret investigation of his own. Perhaps he should have studied
Hitchcock's 1941 classic of paranoid marital strife, Suspicion, in which Joan Fontaine suspects hubby Cary Grant is out to off her. It's
the sort of classic romantic thriller Zemeckis is paying tribute to here,
but Allied is a poor digital facsimile of such celluloid
gems.
Allied is on Amazon Prime Video
UK/ROI now.
