Review of Allied (2016) by Greg C — 07 Dec 2016

Allied is a movie of 2 halves. The Casablanca environment is exotic and fills us with a nostalgia for a time before most of us were born. Marion Cotillard is completely entrancing. The latter half gives Brad Pitt most of its screen time as he tries to figure out if his wife is a German spy.

It keeps us in suspense, but is not as exciting as its first half. I feel like Cotillard is relegated in the second half to furtive glances and questions that are below her character's clearly stellar prowess.

My props go to the production designer. The tunnels, building, air fields, air raids all looked impossibly of-the-period. In a time when CG can give us so much superhero and space fare, it is interesting to see it used with so much in camera real world material to give a subtlety and depth to its images.

And the major weakness of the film is in casting Pitt. He plays a Canadian with a bad Parisian accent. But he sounds like he's from Texas and can't nail a Canadian accent to save his life. I didn't buy the romantic chemistry.

I think the movie would have been better with either someone like an Adrian Brody or Daniel Day Lewis.