Monuments Men features a star-studded cast and good visuals, but the rest seems to lack a little in the “entertaining” part.

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The Monuments Men (low Spoilers, but spoilers all the same)

Running Time- 1hr, 53min

Genre- Action, Biography, Drama, War

Director- George Clooney (Gravity 2013)

Writers-

Screenplay:

George Clooney

Grant Heslov

Book:                  

Robert M. Edsel

Bret Witter

Critics Reviews-

Metascore:

52/100

Rotten Tomatoes:

34% 160 Critics

Box Office-

Domestic:

$22,003,433

Foreign:

(No foreign showings)

“This is their story. It is true. It is history. As a film, it is riveting, suspenseful, harrowing and exciting, and somehow, it also manages to be something rare among war pictures-a-big-scale-entertainment.- Rex Reed, New York Observer

“There’s great repartee between its cast of this “Based on a true [but forgotten] story” of World War II. Yet the film overall isn’t colorful enough.”- Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News

I liked the Monuments Men; it had a great cast, often time’s great visuals and a cool story. The only reason I did not love it was because of the structure, which the film seemed to lack entirely. Now I’ve been to my fair share of movies in theaters, but never once had I ducked in the middle of the film because a gunshot sounded in the movie. I guess I was in an attentive trance, watching the movie for an hour with them talking and traveling. Then boom, a shot is fired at them and I get freaked. Wow, I think. Is that the first bit of action in the film? It turns out, that might as well had been the climax, because what followed was not as good as a child shooting two men from inside a building with a musket. Now yes, the acting was good and the actors/actresses played their part well, if they had a part to act. There was no character development at all, nada. It was just a bunch of men thrown together to capture art, the most information they gave us was their job titles in society. I like character development, like the third movie of the Lord of the Rings, where they show Gollum/smeagle slowly being driven to chaos by the one ring. It’s cool to have a character grow up on screen, to see a little glimpse of their life before the main act. This movie did not seem to care about that, what a shame too, that had so much more to expand on.

George Clooney may be a good actor, but in a film like this, his talent was wasted. I can think of hundreds of ways to improve upon this film, all the ways include directing and screenplay rewrites. I thought this was a mediocre movie, deserving of a 3.2 out of 5 stars. You can watch this movie if you would like, just be aware of the complete lack of structure and the various points I mentioned above this. Thanks for reading, Joel Freecheck.

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