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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

War drama Allied could be so much better

ALLIED (Robert Zemeckis). 124 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Wednesday (November 23). See listing. Rating: NNN


Allied is pretty decent, but it could have been so much better.

Set during the Second World War, Robert Zemeckis’s thriller stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as Max Vatan and Marianne Beauséjour, spies who meet when they’re assigned to pose as husband and wife on an assassination mission in Casablanca.

Initially professional, they warm to each other – she teases him for showing up with a French accent that’s more Quebecois than Parisian, and he pokes fun of her clumsiness with a machine gun. Eventually they become lovers, and when the job is over, he ­arranges her passage to England.

Against the backdrop of the Blitz, they settle down and have a child… and about a year later, British intelligence informs Max that Marianne might be a German mole. A test is set in motion, and if Marianne fails it the only way Max can prove his innocence is to execute her himself.

It’s a premise worthy of Hitchcock (Saboteur crossed with Notorious, maybe?), and the actors make the most of it. Pitt’s terrific as a good man crumbling under the weight of his doubts, and Cotillard is fine as well, though the perspective of Steven Knight’s script won’t let her be much more than enigmatic and alluring for long stretches.

The thing that keeps Allied from really working, though, is Zemeckis. As the action rolled on, I found myself more and more distracted by his obsession with digitally augmented storytelling – using CG trickery to craft long takes that would otherwise be logistically impossible. (This time around, he makes a theme out of filming characters in rooms and cars while incredible action happens outside, glimpsed through the windows.)

When the project can accommodate it, Zemeckis’s invention can be thrilling – see Contact and Cast Away, or last year’s The Walk – but this is a movie about intimacy and betrayal, and it’s hard for Pitt and Cotillard to generate real intensity against green-screen backdrops.

Allied is more like Zemeckis’s Denzel Washington drama Flight. In pursuit of heightened reality, the filmmaker coats everything in a glossy digital sheen that only underlines how fake the whole endeavour is.

It’s still worth watching, but it’s never as real as it needs to be.

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