Movie Breakdown: Allied

Pre-Screening Stance:

The early word on Allied has been slightly negative (at least in my feeds), but I’m still looking forward to it.  Mostly because Robert Zemeckis, Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard are a trio I’ll take any day of the week.

Post-Screening Ramble:

I really enjoyed Allied, but I can understand why it’s been registering as a miss for some.  The film moves pretty quick at first.  An operative named Max Vatan (a stoic Brad Pitt) arrives in North Africa, he immediately gets teamed up with a French Resistance fighter named Marianne Beausejour (an alluring Marion Cotillard), the two of them start going about working together to kill a Nazi official, and then bang, the action ends and the tone shifts.  I think this is where the film stops working for some.  That first act is brisk, kind of dangerous and the back and forth between Max and Marianne is palpable.  But then their mission ends and their relationship begins and director Robert Zemeckis really slows things down in order to let the viewer see just how deeply in love they are with each other.  Personally, I felt like this made the conclusion that much more suspenseful and touching, but if you dive in hoping for a thriller of a spy flick and instead get a love story (even if it contains a mystery that needs to be solved), I can see why you’d scoff and check out.

Allied may be a bit uneven, but I found it to be a nice love story with a solid twist.  See it.

One Last Thought:

There’s a part in Allied where that German fella with the glass boot in the basement scene in Inglorious Basterds shows up and tests Brad Pitt’s character to see if he is who he claims to be.  This made me wonder what it feels like to be typecast as a Nazi.  Like, does he tell people’s he’s “made it” in Hollywood?  Or no?