Kritiken

Despite the profanity, graphic bullet wounds, and collateral damage from grenades and bombs, this is a knowingly grand, old-fashioned movie, and the tension between the slightly blank-slate quality of the main characters and their dialogue and the flagrant, melodramatic bigness of the direction is fascinating; it makes "Allied" something more than a self-aware throwback.

The filmmakers work hard on the plotting and make the pieces fit tightly together (though I found a little give in elements of Marianne's backstory as well as in some of her reasoned decisions), but turn the intrepid, death-defying heroes into cardboard cutouts who merely serve the intricate yet grandly stirring plot rather than energizing it.

The film is schooled in the ways of Curtiz and Hitchcock, of Lean and Powell/Pressburger (the finale even pays homage, as so many movies from the Spielberg generation do, to John Ford's The Searchers). And this pie-eyed adoration of cinema past beautifully complements a tale of two people (characters and performers both) who pretend for a living. The meta aspects of the production never outweigh the straightforward ones, but remain in a pleasingly provocative balance.

Pitt and Cotillard give thoroughly modern performances that still manage to evoke the heightened emotions of classic Hollywood, and Zemeckis orchestrates both the adventurous half and the domestic half with practiced elegance. Allied doesn't quite achieve the overwhelming emotional catharsis for which it aims, but it least it has the wherewithal to try.

In the tense final moments, Cotillard's performance achieves some of the piercing gravity of her work in James Gray's "The Immigrant." But this movie's delicate, lingering emotion isn't just a function of her acting, or of an ending whose wrenching finality seems all the more inevitable in retrospect. Even when "Allied" loses its footing, there is something unmistakably touching about Zemeckis' commitment to evoking a world so quietly, heroically out of step with the times.

Even old-fashioned pleasures now come tricked out with technological bells and whistles—although sometimes, almost against the odds, the results can surprise you. Robert Zemeckis' gorgeous nostalgia dream Allied is a case in point... Its story and dialogue are so straightforward and comforting that even when you think you can hear the next beat coming—and you will—the finale still comes as a cathartic surprise.

The film, like Pitt's performance, is all surface and no feeling. For the story to work, you need to feel and care for the fate of these two lovers, and Zemeckis (working from Steven Knight's ultra-schematic script) does this with maximum efficiency and minimal magic.

It's not as good as the classics, to be sure, but like its heroes it's pretty close to what it's pretending to be. It's the kind of film you can send your parents or grandparents to the next time they complain that they don't make 'em like they used to... It's also — dare I say it — moving. Zemeckis directs with quiet, deliberate precision, but that makes the occasional burst of wild emotion more effective.

Zemeckis brings to bear his pop-epic scope in what's otherwise a claustrophobic story. The first scene, of Max parachuting gently into the Moroccan desert to be met on a sand road by a cab, uses large-scale filmmaking to forecast the more intimate mood of alienation and secrecy... Allied, though, suffers in how little suspense it brings to the central question of Marianne's guilt.