1942. Intelligence agent Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) parachutes into the Moroccan desert, where he's picked up by a wordless driver and taken to Casablanca. There he connects with Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard), a French agent. Together they pose as a married couple – the precursor to a daring assassination attempt on a German ambassador.
Max and Marianne fall for each other, of course, and after the job Max invites her to return with him to London as his wife. Following the Blitz-born birth of their child, the Vatans enjoy an apparently idyllic partnership. But then Vatan's superiors call him in. Questions are raised about Marianne. Is she who she says she is? Could it be that she's telling "a lie"? (Ally, get it?)
Allied isn't a particularly good film. Chief concern is that it is scuppered by a crushing lack of chemistry between its stars. (Goes to show, all the sordid celebrity speculation in the world can't make the magic happen on screen.) I've a feeling the blame rests on the shoulders of Pitt, whose performance here is unusually dull. A flirty Cotillard tries her best to raise him from the dead, to no avail.
But also there is director Robert Zemeckis – such an inventive student of film – who appears to be honing a TV aesthetic here. It worked for Spielberg's Bridge of Spies because that was essentially a chamber piece. But Zemeckis is reaching for grandeur – a feat which should be possible with an $80m-plus budget – without succeeding. Allied has the same hyper-real sheen we saw in his last film, The Walk, whereby everything somehow looks CG even when it isn't.
Structurally, the film has problems. The first half is an outright clunker, with any dramatic tension undermined by the inevitability – the yawning predictability – of the plot shift to come. It's only when the 'twist' (if we can call it that) is finally traversed that the film enters any kind of stride.
Following the move to Blighty, things fare better. Zemeckis's depiction of period Britain has the generic Little England postcard quality that comes from the outsider's eye, and the co-stars can't quite de-glam sufficiently to make their marriage believable, but writer Steven Knight's plot beats keep the narrative chugging in a workmanlike way.
In the last half hour, the film finally sputters into life like an old RAF propeller, but it's too little too late. The climactic scene – a brilliantly tense exercise in visual storytelling of which Hitchcock would be proud – almost feels like it's been cut in from a different movie.
Handsome and competent and quite boring, Allied doesn't even have the good grace to be enjoyably bad. It wears its okayness with pride: big production values, big names, big talent – but little to remember of it a week after watching.
Max and Marianne fall for each other, of course, and after the job Max invites her to return with him to London as his wife. Following the Blitz-born birth of their child, the Vatans enjoy an apparently idyllic partnership. But then Vatan's superiors call him in. Questions are raised about Marianne. Is she who she says she is? Could it be that she's telling "a lie"? (Ally, get it?)
Allied isn't a particularly good film. Chief concern is that it is scuppered by a crushing lack of chemistry between its stars. (Goes to show, all the sordid celebrity speculation in the world can't make the magic happen on screen.) I've a feeling the blame rests on the shoulders of Pitt, whose performance here is unusually dull. A flirty Cotillard tries her best to raise him from the dead, to no avail.
But also there is director Robert Zemeckis – such an inventive student of film – who appears to be honing a TV aesthetic here. It worked for Spielberg's Bridge of Spies because that was essentially a chamber piece. But Zemeckis is reaching for grandeur – a feat which should be possible with an $80m-plus budget – without succeeding. Allied has the same hyper-real sheen we saw in his last film, The Walk, whereby everything somehow looks CG even when it isn't.
Structurally, the film has problems. The first half is an outright clunker, with any dramatic tension undermined by the inevitability – the yawning predictability – of the plot shift to come. It's only when the 'twist' (if we can call it that) is finally traversed that the film enters any kind of stride.
Following the move to Blighty, things fare better. Zemeckis's depiction of period Britain has the generic Little England postcard quality that comes from the outsider's eye, and the co-stars can't quite de-glam sufficiently to make their marriage believable, but writer Steven Knight's plot beats keep the narrative chugging in a workmanlike way.
In the last half hour, the film finally sputters into life like an old RAF propeller, but it's too little too late. The climactic scene – a brilliantly tense exercise in visual storytelling of which Hitchcock would be proud – almost feels like it's been cut in from a different movie.
Handsome and competent and quite boring, Allied doesn't even have the good grace to be enjoyably bad. It wears its okayness with pride: big production values, big names, big talent – but little to remember of it a week after watching.