Review of The Monuments Men (2014) by Shaun B — 22 Nov 2014

The Monument Men is a painfully boring movie. The premise should be awesome-it's based on the real life men who were tasked with going in and protecting art from the hands of the Third Reight. The problem is the movie goes about showing how they did this in some of the most dreadfully boring ways.

For a cast that include George Clooney John Goodman, Bill Murray and Matt Damon, it's shocking that they all almost entirely remain two dimensional, only defined by what they are ordered to carry out and do. Even George Clooney lacks charm-which is amazing because he's George freaking Clooney. The cast is separated into three small groups most of the times so you rarely even get the fun back and forth style dialogue you would expect from this cast. The bigger problem here though is that the film never really explores the art aspect: We are told from the beginning that it's worth saving because by not doing it we're killing history, but that's said in a monologue by Clooney at the beginning and is rarely ever expanded on beyond that. The World War 2 combat is not worth writing home about either-you probably can see more exciting fights in a Call of Duty stream on YouTube. This whole thing is an amazingly wasted opportunity.