THE MONUMENTS MEN

The critics weren't much taken with George Clooney's fourth outing as a director, and sadly neither was I.

The subject of the film is the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section Unit, which was a program set up during World War II.  It comprised about 400 service members and civilians who worked with military forces to protect historic and cultural monuments from war damage, and towards the end of the war to find and return works of art etc.

This program had a noble aim, but from the above description it's obviously not going to be easy to find a satisfying way to dramatise its work.  On the evidence of this film it may be an impossible challenge.

Clooney and his co-writer tackle it by firstly making the program into a race against time - can art works be recovered from the Nazis before they are destroyed? - and secondly by reducing the program to a small gang - not so much the Dirty Dozen as the Arty Eight.

For this approach to work, the viewer has to care about their mission, which frankly I didn't.  

There are two or three times in the film where a character (usually Clooney's) articulates the importance of saving cultural items for future generations, but none of these cut through to me. 

Nor did I believe that any of the main characters cared about or knew anything about art.  This is down to the screenplay which makes no effort to flesh out any of them in a believable way - they're just a bunch of famous actors (Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, etc) wandering from one warzone to another. 

Although the film is based on real events and real people I don't think there was a single scene in the film which rang true to me.

The visual style of the film is bland, the dialogue is unmemorable, the whole thing lacks any dramatic flair or tension.  There's little momentum to the story.  Instead we get a series of small episodes which don't add up to much.

Such as two characters being shot at by a sniper, who turns out to be a small child.

Such as Matt Damon with his foot on a landmine, which may or may not be a dud (spoiler alert - it's a dud).

Such as Bill Murray's character getting emotional whilst listening to a Christmas song.

Such as a poorly staged action sequence of sorts involving two characters in a field.

Hugh Bonneville, miscast as an ex-alcoholic on his uppers, dies in an unnecessary and pointless way, but we're supposed to believe his death was a noble sacrifice.

The nearest we get to an interesting character is Cate Blanchett as a French woman who has being keeping a record of all the Nazi art shipments from Paris.  for some inexplicable reason she is hostile to Matt Damon's character, who after all is trying to stop the art works from being destroyed, yet equally inexplicably she suddenly decides to not only hand over the information she possesses but offers to go to bed with him.

Dear oh dear.  

RATING: x Find Something Better To Do