THE MONUMENTS MEN

Synopsis: A group of experts are tasked with recovering lost works of art before it is destroyed by the Nazis. Monuments Men deals with the fight to preserve and recover plundered Nazi treasures before they are lost forever. That sounds like a fairly straightforward, if specialised, war movie, the problem is that the film makers don’t seem quite sure what kind of film they wanted to make. To illustrate this point I will post two links at the bottom of this page, one is the first trailer, which takes a comedic tone, and a second trailer which takes a very different tone, focusing on the drama and emotional impact of the story. I think this best illustrates the main problem with the film, it doesn’t know if it’s a high spirited adventure/comedy or a moving war drama. Worse still, the weightings on the comedy side are very sparse, indeed from a comedy standpoint the film is a severe failure. There are some laughs but they are mainly muted with the main comedy set piece being shown in the trailer. If one were to go in with the expectations of the first trailer then you would be severely disappointed. On the dramatic side things are more promising; the film does a worthy job in getting its audience invested in the fate of the stolen art work. Since most of the film’s audience (myself included) will not know a Rembrandt form a Rolf Harris this is vital. Strong chemistry between the principal performers helps this process along, the ‘buddy cop’ vibe is best felt between Bill Murray’s Sgt Richard Campbell and Bob Balaban’s Preston Savitz. Even in its strongest point the film is not without problems, the drama is not consistent - some scenes have you hooked and invested in the quest only for things to come to a screeching halt at other. A plot strand involving Matt Damon is particularly guilty of this dragging on for twice as long as it feels it needs to. This is a shame because when the film gets going it can produce very moving scenes. FINAL VERDICT 5/10 there is a solid foundation that might have been built on here but it feels like the film is lacking in what it might have been. Trailer 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npBafjCCILw Trailer 2- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEj-UyqseU8