Everything Wrong With ‘Allied’ In One Helpful List (FILM REVIEW)

[rating=1.00]

Have you ever gone to a friend’s house so they could show you something quick that they did on their new video game, and you end up spending 110 minutes staring resentfully at their TV? That’s pretty much what Allied is like, a toothless, rudderless, wholly uninspired WWII romance starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as attractive spies who have to work together and not fall in love. Of course, they fall in love and get married, have a kid, and try to build a life together across several frustratingly overused time jumps across war-torn Europe.

Despite presenting itself as a film, it has an alarming number of scenes that seem to take place in the uncanny valley, giving the impression that director Robert Zemeckis spent so much time on movies like Beowulf and Polar Express that he’s forgotten how human beings talk, walk, stand, look, and project emotion. This would also be a good time to mention that going into this movie, I’d done absolutely no research about who was involved in the production. While I usually do this to avoid having any preconceived expectations about what I’m about to watch, I can’t help but wonder what I would’ve thought of this movie if I actually had any expectations whatsoever.

But, I didn’t have any, so here’s a spoiler-free list of the 16 things that are wrong with Allied.

– The opening tracking shot is meant (I assume) to capture the beauty of the Moroccan desert, which is completely undermined when an obviously-CG Brad Pitt crosses into frame.

– I’m convinced that Brad Pitt was entirely computer generated through at least the first two-thirds of the movie.

– The dialogue is maddeningly tone-deaf.

– The characters’ blocking is so unnatural it’s completely distracting, but on the upside it goes well with the infuriatingly tone-deaf dialogue.

– All these points so far, when combined, makes everything come off like an unending string of video game cutscenes.

– The first portion of the movie is set in Casablanca, so every time one of the characters refers to where they’re located (which is a lot), it invokes the far superior WWII romantic drama that bears its name. This seems like an odd choice, creatively.

– There’s a scene where Brad Pitt has to prove to a Nazi that he’s a skilled poker player by shuffling a deck of cards, which is photographed with either a closeup of Pitt’s face accompanied by the sound of shuffling cards, or a closeup of a pair of stunt hands furiously shuffling a deck of cards. It seems like a really low-budget in-camera editing trick to use, especially after all the subpar CG that’s been forced upon us already.

– Also, that card shuffling scene goes on way longer than it has to.

– There’s no chemistry whatsoever between Pitt and Marion Cotillard, almost like she spent her time on set being forced to act against a tennis ball that had “Brad Pitt” written on it.

– As the two characters accomplish their first big mission together, I kept looking at the screen for a guide as to which button on my controller I was supposed to mash.

– After spending the entire movie up until this point talking about how emotions will undo any spy mission, he suggests she move to London with him and get married. She agrees. K.

– She gives birth to their daughter during an air raid in London, as their hospital gets firebombed. I can’t add anymore commentary to this because I can’t believe I just typed that fucking sentence.

-Wait, scratch that, a plane crashes next to the firebombed hospital just after all this happens, which almost no one reacts to.

– The movie’s time jumps are incredibly random, but at least they’re consistently awkward.

– Just as things seem to be going well (aside form the fact that the war is still going on), the identity of Cotillard’s character comes into question, which he learns about in a windowless room with Pitt putting his fists on his hips in a way that no human being has ever done non-ironically.

– The rest of the movie is Pitt sending people to their death and risking a tremendous amount of national security (again, during WWII) to find out the truth, despite the fact that he just had to wait, like, two days and it would’ve been figured out anyway.

– Finally, as the film was coming to an expectedly hackneyed close, complete with a tacked-on narrative monologue, and this godawful film finally ends, I think to myself “what talentless hack threw this piece of shit movie together?” Imagine my surprise when I see the words “Directed by Robert Zemeckis” pop up on the screen right after the fade to black.

Allied is now playing in theaters everywhere.