Clooney Disappoints With Disjointed and Treacly "The Monuments Men"

The Monuments Men has a hell of a cast.

I expected to love The Monuments Men.

It features a plethora of actors I adore in George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, and John Goodman. It's based on a fascinating, true-life story about a platoon of art historians and curators tasked with reclaiming and returning art Hitler pillaged during WWII after it was discovered he planned to destroy it all if he lost the war. And it's written, directed and produced by Clooney, a Hollywood icon with eclectic tastes and a consistent desire to work on quality films.

 

And yet, having finally seen it, I have to say I'm disappointed. It's good in spurts and looks fantastic, but it's a tonal, episodic mess that's far too preachy and treacly for its own good. 

 

In case the trailer didn't give it away, The Monuments Men is a message movie. It has a theme -- art and culture are important to defining who we are and are worth risking your neck for -- and it hits that theme hard. 

Conceptually, that's a good thing, but unfortunately the film goes overboard on the sentimentality, straining for poignancy at every turn. The film's heart is in the right place, but it has too much on-the-nose monologuing and a laughable denouement that's a direct descendant of the one from the otherwise splendid Saving Private Ryan. The end result is a product that feels awfully artificial.

 

Meanwhile, the tone of the film is all over the place. Clooney seems to be going for the jauntiness of Ocean's 11 mixed with the schmaltz of a Capra film, which doesn't play to his strengths as a writer/director. Clooney has proven adept at serious civic lessons (Good Night, and Good Luck), but inept at light comedy (Leatherheads). Unfortunately, mixing the two together doesn't really work.

 

Bill Murray and Bob Balaban do a lot with a little, which I guess is

kind of their thing in general, so why not here.

All that being said, The Monuments Men's biggest problem is it's lack of narrative drive. The script breaks its characters into teams, sending them off on various objectives that don't really build toward anything in the way tasks would in a heist film along the lines of the Ocean films. This results in a movie that feels like a loosely connected series of vignettes, some of which are interesting, most of which feel like wheel spinning and all of which don't coalesce into a dynamic whole. The film has more in common with the likes of Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve than was probably intended.

 

The tandem of Murray and Bob Balaban get all the best material. There's a nice scene in which the two stumble into a Mexican standoff of sorts with an SS soldier, another where Murray gets emotional over a recorded message sent from his family at Christmas, and a third where the two come across a former Nazi we know to be a baddie but they do not. Each scene with these guys is interesting -- sadly that cannot be said about the rest of the Monuments Men.

 

Actually, that's not entirely fair -- Hugh Bonneville gets some nice grace notes to play in his brief role as a washed out alcoholic who gets a second chance to make something of himself as part of this operation. But the rest is pretty piss poor. Goodman and Jean Dujardin, last seen together on screen in The Artist, get the shortest shrift with a collection of scenes that add up to very little and aren't even involving or cute in and of themselves (a factor that saves many of the vignettes featuring the likes of Clooney, Damon and Blanchett). 

 

Thinking on the film, I'm left to wonder if this story might have made for a better documentary. In such a context, the disjointed nature wouldn't seem so bad, and more time could've been spent with historians and the men themselves (or, at the very least, their descendants).

 

As it is, this is a flawed film that mostly wastes the assembled talent because the script doesn't really work on the macro level, despite some micro successes. I'd still rather have my movie stars working on whiffs like this than lower ceiling cookie cutter crap, but The Monuments Men just didn't work for me. C+

‘Monsters University’ Proves a Worthwhile Return to a Beloved Pixar Property

Mike and Sully end up in a fraternity with a slew of other cast-offs,

who, surprise surprise, show there's more to them than there seems.

In reflecting on Monsters University, the recently released sequel to Monsters Inc., I can’t help being a bit amused by how meta a film Pixar has crafted.

Over the last few years, the Pixar brand has lost a bit of its luster. Three of the studio’s last four films have been sequels, while the one original work – last year’s Brave – was largely viewed as a slight effort, despite walking away with last year’s Oscar for Best Animated Film.

In reviewing Brave earlier this year, I agreed it was lower-tier Pixar, but suggested there was nothing wrong with being merely good. The folks at Pixar might agree, because the major lesson of Monsters University seems to be it’s okay to be okay.

The film shows how Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sully (John Goodman) meet as students at Monsters University, and the duo are immediately set up as adversaries, with Mike being a well-studied but unscary student, and Sully being an arrogant kid who believes he can coast on his innate ability and famous last name. After an argument between the two gets them kicked out of the “scarer program,” the two are forced to join Oozma Kappa (OK – get it?), the lamest fraternity on campus, for a chance to compete in the “Scare Games,” a Greek competition that, if won, will get them back into the scarer program.

Pixar made little Mike Wazowski ridiculously cute.

However, boiled down to its essence, this is a film about a boy with a dream, who, despite trying harder than everyone else and working nonstop to achieve said dream, ultimately fails because he just doesn’t have what it takes. Early in the film, the intimidating Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren) says scariness is the measure of a monster, and so, if you’re not scary, what worth can you have?

Even though the film indicates there’s value in failure, that’s still a pretty ballsy core to structure an animated kids’ movie around, especially since it is so at odds with the typical “you can do anything you set your mind to” spiel.

The timing of this film is worth noting since the children who first fell in love with these characters when Monsters Inc. was released in 2001 are now college-aged themselves. Some will achieve their dreams, but many more will not, and I expect this film will speak to many of them, not to mention the rest of us who will relate to Mike’s existential crisis. 

Unfortunately, as potent as the emotional throughline of the story is, the rest of the film is incredibly formulaic. This is Pixar’s take on the college underdog comedy typified by the likes of Revenge of the Nerds, and it moves along exactly as you’d expect, up to and including the triumphant moment when our seemingly hopeless ragtag team of misfits prevails over the douchey popular kids.

Making matters worse, almost no character beyond Mike and Sully is given more than a modicum of development, including their four fellow fraternity brothers. We’re meant to be emotionally invested in these guys, but they aren’t even afforded the development of the extra girls in piffle like The House Bunny. The crazy one voiced by Charlie Day brings some welcome zaniness to the table, but middle-aged monster and monster with mom are both underserved, while two-headed monster is almost pointless. Their names don’t matter; these descriptors are how most will remember them.

This picture was too funny not to include here.

To be fair, right when a normal college comedy would be ending, Monsters University takes a hard left turn into fertile thematic territory. Up until then, the film is mostly an amiable diversion, but the final 15 minutes really deepen the story and elevate the whole thing quite a bit.

Furthermore, while I generally feel prequels are pointless endeavors, I’ve got to give Pixar credit for crafting a story that stands on its own while simultaneously enhancing the original. The film has plenty of clever nods to Monsters Inc., including a well-handled subplot involving future nemesis Randall (Steve Buscemi), but, more than that, it deepens the connection between Mike and Sully, a partnership that did feel a bit one-sided in favor of scare-master Sully in the first outing. Here, they balance that out quite a bit.

Overall, this is middle-of-the-pack Pixar, more impressive than the likes of Cars, Brave, and A Bug’s Life, but not quite up to the level of the rest of the studio’s oeuvre. But at this point, it’s silly and unfair to keep measuring Pixar’s output against the likes of Toy Story, Wall-E and Ratatouille.

By the end of Monsters University, big dreamer Mike realizes it’s okay to be okay, but even that undersells what Pixar has accomplished here. As far as this film goes, it’s better to say it’s good to be good. B+

Changing Up the Formula Proves Problematic for 'The Hangover Part III'

The Hangover Part III misguidedly turns Chow into a lead and becomes a
heist movie.

In the lead up to The Hangover Part III, director Todd Phillips defended the preceding entry in the series to Empire, saying "Yes we do a wake-up and a blackout, but every joke in Hangover II is completely different. My feeling is that it's better [than the first movie]. I think it's human nature that any time people want to try something for a second time, people go to a negative. I think in five or ten year's time, people will come to realize how brilliant Hangover II is." 

Before commenting on the specifics of such a comment, I should mention that I concur with Forbes contributor Scott Mendelson’s assessment that it is refreshing to see a filmmaker stand by his film, as opposed to shitting on it as a way to sell the next one as an improvement.

Having said that, I do believe most of what Phillips says is nonsense. The second movie is not better than the first, and a majority of the jokes are pointedly the same (as shown in this Vulture piece). For that reason, Phillips was lambasted for making a lazy carbon copy of the original, instead of trying to evolve the story and do something different.

The Hangover Part III seems to be a direct answer to that criticism.  Although Doug (Justin Bartha) is left to the side once again, the movie attempts to switch up the formula. The lead trio is not drugged and they do not spend the movie trying to piece together what happened the night before (despite the title, there is no hangover). Instead, the minor role of Chow (Ken Jeong) is beefed up and action and heist elements are grafted onto the story.


Melissa McCarthy lends the film some much needed humor in her few scenes.

All of this proves a massive misstep. As Community has already proven, Jeong is best used in small doses, and yet here, he’s arguably co-lead with Zach Galifianakis. In fact, the first five minutes of the movie are spent with him, and he is the catalyst for the entire plot, which finds our heroes caught in the middle of his feud with a gangster (John Goodman) over $42 million in gold bars.

Making matters worse, the film is rarely funny, occasionally saccharine and often infuriating. Watching Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms) attempt to discover what happened during a crazy night with Alan (Galifianakis) as an oddball tagalong is a good time. Watching them constantly being outsmarted by a crazy psychopath like Chow, only to feel sympathy for him even though they know he’s a double-crossing murderer? Not so much.

Having seen Part III, I find myself appreciating the second film more than I originally did. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it brilliant, it is a funny film, and there is something to be said for the way it unashamedly mimics the first one, while simultaneously escalating the events and self destruction to gonzo, nightmarish heights. It’s a sequel that almost plays like a remake, albeit one with more money and more freedom to go full hog. In that way, it’s sort of like Evil Dead 2.

Meanwhile, outside of a few random bits of awkward inanity from Galifianakis, Part III is a just a limp exercise. It’s telling that the biggest laughs come courtesy of a 90-second credit sequence that offers an intentionally derivative glimpse of a morning after hangover following another night of revelry. Hangover films work better with a hangover. Go figure. D+