Brad Pitt

Allied

Director: Robert Zemeckis (2016) BBFC cert: 15

Brad Pitt is torn between love and duty in this muddled Second World War spy drama.

It can’t decide if it wants to be a noirish thriller, a 007 action or an epic wartime romance. As a result some performances struggle, especially a ponderous Brad Pitt.

The Hollywood heavyweight plays Max, an undercover RAF airman who receives a very warm welcome when he parachutes into Nazi occupied French Morocco. Max has extraordinary skill with a deck of cards and can strangle you in all of two languages.

While on a deadly mission to execute a high ranking Nazi, Max falls in love with a glamorous French spy, Marianne. Well, its more romantic than Tinder at any rate. When she is accused of treason, Max has seventy two hours to prove her innocence, or execute her himself.

Marion Cotillard is fabulous as the beautiful secret agent, giving the script a life it doesn’t deserve and doing all the dramatic heavy lifting.

The problems of the poor script are exacerbated by the woefully miscasting of Pitt in a much younger man’s role. The 52 year old is playing an RAF wing commander. Real life wingco Guy Gibson was 24 when he lead his famous Dam Busters raid.

Max is part James Bond and part Rick Blaine, but Pit is too old for the former and lacks the wearied hinterland of the latter. As Pitt is too old then arguably so is Cotillard, though at 41 at least we have a leading man paired with an almost age appropriate co-star.

Pitt sports some well cut suits and a pained expression. He appears to be aiming for enigmatic but it suggests indigestion instead. Pitt executes his brief action moves with the conviction of Roger Moore in his later Bond films.

Pitt’s contemporary Hugh Grant has responded to being freed by age from the tyranny of physical perfection with a career best performance in Florence Foster Jenkins (2016). But Pitt lacks energy and enthusiasm.

There’s an ambassadors party where chocolates are definitely off the menu. Plus there’s plenty of period cars and planes to keep vintage vehicle enthusiasts happy. Plus there’s an ample supply of camels. Which is nice.

Allied skips between London and Casablanca without taking much humour, action, suspense or interest with it. Key moments are ramped up by environment to the point of parody. Eventually the whole exercise slowly sinks beneath the soggy sands of sentiment and leaves barely any trace of itself on your  memory.

Following the 1942 classic film, it’s a schoolboy error to set a Second World War romance in Casablanca. Even the best modern film struggles to compete with the magic of Bogart and Bergman at their imperious peak, and this is far from being the best film.

Don’t play this again, Sam.

★★☆☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

 

By The Sea

Director: Angelina Jolie Pitt (2015)

With bickering, boozing and bust ups, life’s far from a beach in this exasperating period drama.

Written and directed by Jolie Pitt, it’s a moody, beautiful and sincere exploration of grief and love.

It’s also seriously dull and a far cry in tone and scale from her last directorial effort, the entertaining second world war action epic Unbroken (2014).

Jolie Pitt’s ambition to stretch her range is admirable and she’s crafted a well acted movie with a consistent tone.

She co-stars with real life hubby Brad Pitt as an unhappily married couple holidaying in the south of France.

But Jolie’s writing strands them both with unappealing characters and some awful dialogue.

Vanessa is a pathetic, self-pitying and pill popping former dancer.

Roland’s a hard drinking chain smoking novelist who seems to model himself on Ernest Hemingway.

They’re nursing an unspoken grief the eventual revelation of which is predictable and a very long time coming.

Their strained relationship changes when passionate young newlyweds check into the hotel suite next door.

They’re played by the beautiful and frequently naked pair of Melvil Poupaud and Melanie Laurent.

What  follows is sunbathing and shopping as well a lot of voyeurism and a little violence.

There’s a vague sense of By The Sea being a thriller without a crime or a heist without a con.

It could be set in any time or place and still achieve the lavish levels of dramatic inertia.

Malta stands in for Cote D’Azur and is suitably ravishing while the1973 setting allows for extremely glamorous clothes and cars.

Brad sports some fabulous looking flannel which is exactly what this film amounts to.

★★☆☆☆

World War Z

Director: Marc Foster (2013)

Max Brooks’ brilliant zombie apocalypse novel has been crunched into an action movie template, given a tremendous blockbuster gloss and lit with Brad Pitt’s star wattage.

There is little humour and not much sentimentality but the performances full of conviction and provide an anchor for the action.

It keeps the real world sense of the book while shedding its multi-storied narrative.

Pitt remains a charismatic screen presence but beyond generic action man qualities, no great acting range is required of him.

He plays Gerry Lane, a UN investigator on a mission to save what’s left of the human race after a sudden, devastating zombie attack.

No one knows where or how the zombie pandemic originated but the globe’s cities are abandoned after the lightning fast and murderous onslaught of the undead.

Leaving his wife Karin (Mireille Enos) and daughters Connie (Sterling Jerins) and Rachel (Abigail Hargrove) in the supposed safety of a US aircraft carrier, Lane flies around the world looking for a cure for what is assumed to be a virus.

Moving swiftly from the US to South Korea, Israel and Wales, the blockbuster’s action sequences keep tumbling over one another like the many frenzied zombies at the walls of Jerusalem. That is one of the many thrilling sequences that are tense, violent and guaranteed to make you jump.

With much twitching, convulsing and moaning, the teeth-knocking monsters operate at two speeds: in the absence of prey they are in a moaning and shuffling semi-hibernation. When they attack they become a scary, swirling, swarm of flesh-hungry predators.

Some smart dialogue is scattered among the skin-crawling sound effects. This helps generate tension by hijacking your imagination to do the film’s dirty work for it.

Among the helicopters, transport planes and aircraft carriers, it unusually features soldiers who can shoot straight. Plus it presents sidekicks to provide fresh meat so we’re never sure who will survive.

Driven with a frantic energy and technical prowess, World War Z is is a exciting action adventure.

Though it’s preposterous by nature, the conviction of the players keep the spectacle grounded.

The plot holes widen alarmingly as the film struggles to conclude and though it struggles to maintain its ferocious pace, Z still keeps you interested until its surprisingly low-key ending.

★★★★☆

Fury

Director: David Ayer (2014)

Hollywood big gun Brad Pitt rolls into action as a battle-hardened tank commander in this mud and guts war epic that takes no prisoners.

Engineered to a familiar and straight-forward narrative, US army Private Norman (Logan Lerman) is sent straight from basic training to the frontline as the Second World War draws to a bloody conclusion.

Despite being a uniformed clerk, recent losses mean he has to join a Sherman tank unit under the merciless leadership of Sergeant “Wardaddy” Collier (Pitt).

Pitt is a trusted father figure to the crew who have been with him since the North African campaign  and include mechanic Boyd ‘Bible’ Swan – a barely recognisable Shia LaBeouf, plus driver ‘Gordo’ (Michael Pena) and gunner ‘Coon-Ass’ (Jon Bernthal).

Struggling to adapt to his close-knit and de-sensitised comrades, the raw recruit is pounded as their tank – nicknamed Fury – rumbles into a series of battles as they cross the muddy fields of Nazi Germany.

Bravery is matched by savagery as soldiers are blown up, burnt, decapitated, shot and stabbed. There’s a brief and tense period of R&R in a small town where liberation comes at a very personal price for the local women.

Then Wardaddy leads a convoy that encounters a militarily superior enemy Tiger tank and only the Fury survives to continue the mission to the ferocious finale.

Riveted together with excellent acting and direction, the phenomenal fight sequences leave you battered and bruised. Macho down to its army boots, this brilliant and brutal war movie that magnificently depicts war as hell.

★★★★☆