Review of The Monuments Men (2014) by Python2000 — 18 Feb 2014

I feel obliged to start off by saying that the movie being booed and critically panned at the Berlin Film Festival was wrong and completely unjustified. The Monuments Men is based on a true story just like most of the dramatic movies which have been released over the past 6 months (American Hustle, Dallas Buyers Club, 12 Years a Slave, The Wolf of Wall Street).

Despite many critics commenting on the poor acting quality I though all of the performances were decent, nothing special, surprisingly Cate Blanchett is the weakest and forever trying to make her accent just a little bit more realistic but fails.

The least well known member of the almost ensemble Bob Balaban is by far the best but not on one of the posters for the movie at all, probably because he is not well known so the advertising campaign will do better.

Again in contrast to what the critics have been saying the plot of The Monuments Men is compelling and believable (probably because it is true). What impressed me the most though was the dazzling cinematography and brilliant sets which were so realistic I can't believe they weren't filmed on location.

However you may be wondering why I haven't said anything bad but I have given the movie a pretty low score. The problem is that quite a few minor things are cliched. Lots of minor things to be honest.

Just some of these are the hammy dialogue, the cliched Great Escape like soundtrack (a very rare thing) and the period costumes which I really doubt were not what they actually wore, having read sections of the book I can assure they are not even close.

Another thing was the stilted attempts at humor in serious situations which took away from the atmosphere, created quite well especially in the death scenes may I add, and I didn't usually laugh at. But the most annoying flaw about The Monuments Men was how Clooney felt the need to do the way too obvious "not showing the Presidents face" gimmick, which always irritates me because it just feels pointless.

While it didn't offend me or ruin the true story in any way, my enjoyment of The Monuments Men was severely affected by many minor problems which added up to one big problem.