Tonally and structurally fragmented

Rating: Null/10 (24 May 2014)

It is easy to give marketing departments a hard time – for giving away too much in the credits or for showing the good bits or just for making a terrible film look good. In regard to this film, the marketing seems to be in the same boat as the viewer because it is really hard to know how to sell Monuments Men when the film itself seems not to know what it wants to do or be. The story is a true one, of an action to save works of art from being lost or destroyed as the Nazi's begin their retreat across Europe. As such there must be a good story in here somewhere but it is not really to be found here.
The story it tells is all well and good but for some reason it is not particularly well structured as it has characters and actions split up without ever really making a good connection between them until later in the film and by then it is too little too late. The uneven story telling is one thing, but it is the uneven tone that is the bigger problem. At times it is somber, other times it wants to Ocean's WWII, then it is serious again, then it is comedic – it is not impossible to mix the content like this but it is hard to do and this film just feels like they were spinning a "what type of film is this" wheel before shooting each scene.
As the film doesn't work it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the starry cast are wasted – because frankly they are. Some of them don't know what film they are in, while some of them are playing it 100% certain what film they are in – it just happens to be a different one from other people. I'm not sure what went wrong with it, but it does flap around all over the place with Clooney seeming to be unable to get control of it. It doesn't help that it runs to almost 2 hours, because that is way too long for a film that doesn't work.
There are moments in here and perhaps for some the interest in the real story may be enough to keep the interest, but for me I found it too consistently uneven in terms of its tone and its structure.