Not succeeding as a World War II drama, spy thriller or love story, "Allied" is what you will find in the dictionary if you look up "insipid." It's hard to squander the star power of Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard together, especially if they're handsomely costumed and smooching a lot, but somehow it has been done. If it was a student-thesis feature in film school, it would barely earn a passing grade. It is vanilla banality run amok.
Here we have Pitt at his poker-faced worst, playing a deadly Canadian spy/assassin parachuting behind German lines, donning retro-stylish civilian disguises and carrying off machine gun raids resembling rejected outtakes from "Inglourious Basterds." Let me repeat that so you don't think I have made a mistake. Pitt plays a two-fisted, rock-hard espionage agent and trigger man _ from Canada. By speaking in an accent that has never been within 1,000 miles of Montreal.
At his side is Cotillard as a French resistance fighter with the sharpshooter rifle skills of Annie Oakley. They meet cute when he pretends to be her husband to occupy her flat as they prepare for the film's opening gundown at a Nazi cocktail klatsch in occupied North Africa. She is unexpectedly attracted to him, perhaps because his flat francophone accent is even worse than his Canadian and she feels sorry for him.
They kiss. They go target shooting like Olympic marksmen. They watch the sunset from atop sand dunes. They wear remarkably well-tailored clothing. They make out longtime inside their car in the midst of an endless, howling sandstorm. They go to the swastika shindig and fire a lot of blanks at a lot of stuntmen who pretend to be shot. Then comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in London, their new wartime home.
The plot thickens a wimpy amount as British spy bureaucrats suspect she might really be a double-crossing German spy. They assign him to investigate the mother of his child and shoot her dead if she deserves it. That makes him so cross he kicks a chair across the room. Well, if you don't, we'll hang you, they say, so there. He frowns (I think _ there's a lot of poker-face here) and stops automatically kissing her every time they meet. Which makes her give him back some flinty stares, so maybe she really is a spy? And what do you think the big reveal might be?
By my measure, this is the worst film in the careers of Pitt, Cotillard and director Robert Zemeckis, and he made "The Polar Express," "Death Becomes Her" and "Beowulf." More creativity went into naming the leading characters Max Vatan and Marianne Beausejour than any other aspect of the film. Well, to be fair, there are a couple of shots showing coronas of glowing tracer bullets being fired against German bombers across the night sky over London. Those are nice. But seriously, that's it. You know how theaters hand out 3-D glasses for some screenings? For this they should distribute blinder goggles.
We can do better than this. We must.
