REVIEW - 'The Monuments Men'

'The Monuments Men' (PG-13) **1/2
An unlikely World War II platoon consisting of architects, sculptors and professors (George Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Jean Dujardin) is tasked to rescue art masterpieces from Nazi thieves and return them to their owners.  With Cate Blanchett as a French museum worker. 

This was one I had been looking forward to seeing.  The trailers for it looked really good.  It's got a great cast, good director, the story is interesting, and it was possibly gearing up for awards contention with it's original December release.  But apparently it was pushed back to February because of needing more time for post production.  I was disappointed, but still looked forward to the movie all the same. 

But then I finally saw the movie.  And you know what....overall it's just not very interesting.  Aside from George Clooney's one speech about why it's important to save works of art there isn't really any sense of urgency to save these.  You don't really learn much about these characters.  We're just more or less thrown straight into finding the various Monuments Men and introductions are thrown about later during a scene at basic training.  Half of them I couldn't remember what their names were until the closing credits.  The acting for the most part is okay, but it's nothing special. 

Now, having said how much I wasn't really invested in it and how uninteresting it was, there are a few scenes in the movie actually are pretty good.  The scene where Bill Murray gets a Christmas care package from home that contains a recording of his granddaughters singing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas".  The scene from the trailer that shows Matt Damon accidentally stepping on a land mine.  And a scene where Bill Murray and Bob Balaban are at a farm trying to get help in their mission.  Those three scenes honestly were the main highlights from the movie but it also shows how drastically the tone changes.  Sometimes it's dead serious, other times it's tense, other times it's very light-hearted about itself.  But whenever they do drop a one liner it usually is a bit funny.  The musical score is also pretty good.    

This is the fifth movie directed by George Clooney.  The others being the Chuck Barris biography 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind', the football comedy 'Leatherheads', the 1950s newsroom drama 'Good Night and Good Luck", and the political thriller 'The Ides of March'.  Out of those I've only seen 'The Ides of March', which actually is a pretty good movie.  It shows a fair amount of political wheeling and dealing and backstabbing and scandals behind the scenes of the Ohio Democratic Primary.  If you like the Netflix series "House of Cards" you'll probably like 'Ides of March'.  Heck, the creator of "House of Cards" wrote the play on which 'Ides of March' was based on.  Despite being two completely different movies, I'd still say that 'Ides of March' is better than 'Monuments Men'. 

Overall 'The Monuments Men' has it's moments, but for the most part it's just rather uninteresting.

 

TRAILERS:
'Pompeii' - looks like if you combined '300' and 'Pearl Harbor' in a blender, and the blender fell onto the floor.

'X-Men:  Days of Future Past' - looking forward to it, but at the same time I'm still really mixed about this movie.

'The Amazing Spider-man 2' - I've already seen 'Spider-man 2'.  It came out ten years ago and is one of the best superhero movies. 

'Million Dollar Arm' - looks okay.

'Sabotage' - looks like it could be a solid rental.

'Edge of Tomorrow' - looks like if you combined 'Oblivion' and 'Groundhog Day' in a blender. 

'Draft Day' - This looks like it could go in one of two different ways:  Either it could it be pretty good....or it could be ridiculously boring.