Columbia Pictures was very worried when George Clooney asked if he could push back the release date for "The Monuments Men", his fifth directorial feature, citing more time needed to complete the film's special effects. Delaying the film until February meant missing the cutoff for Academy Award consideration, a seemingly suicidal move for a film based on a true story about valiant men during World War II stuffed to the gills with Oscar-winning talent. But Columbia need not have worried -- "Monuments" would never have been in the running for any major awards, anyway.
The film, about art historians tasked with protecting priceless artifacts from Hitler and his Nazis during their retreat to Germany, is a depressingly pedestrian effort that fails primarily because it doesn't know what kind of movie it wants to be. A sweeping historical epic? A tongue-in-cheek war parody? An art-themed spy thriller? "Monuments" tries to be all of these at once, and misses the mark on each. Just when the film is ratcheting up the emotion, it undercuts itself with a bit of slapstick. But neither is the humor consistent enough to brand the film a comedy. And it never quite reaches the level of being like "Ocean's Eleven", something which the trailers promised. What's left is a stilted and stultifying hodgepodge of ideas that never gel.
"Monuments" is hampered even further by a cast of characters that could maybe be called two-dimensional if we're being generous. Every great actor who was roped into this film is stuck with an insulting caricature, reduced to repeatedly personifying one personality trait with no hope of development. Matt Damon's character exists to speak French poorly. John Goodman's exists to be good-naturedly grouchy. Bill Murray and Bob Balaban's exist to be perpetual annoyed with each other. Jean Dujardin's exists to be rakishly handsome. Hugh Bonneville's exists to be British and George Clooney's exists to spout eloquent aphorisms worthy of a History Channel special (Cate Blanchett is the most memorable presence in the film, both because she's the only female in sight and also because, well, she's Cate Blanchett.)
To be sure, there is a fascinating story to be told here and Clooney seems genuinely interested by the topic, but one walks away from "Monuments" wishing that Clooney had decided to fund a well-researched documentary instead of attempting vaingloriously to craft a star vehicle for himself and his buddies. The concept at the core of "Monuments" is a poignant and oft-unexplored one: that Hitler was after the destruction of more than humans; his goal was the ultimate destruction of humanity. There's a great movie out there to be built around that idea -- and every so often you can catch a tantalizing glimpse of it behind the curtain of celebrity bluster that is "Monuments". Which, of course, just makes the flaccid end result all the more disappointing.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CreneTs7sGs[/youtube]
