disappointing!

Rating: 4/10 (31 May 2014)

It is a bummer when 20th Century Fox rescheduled Clooney's fifth director endeavor THE MONUMENTS MEN into a lukewarm February release, bodes ill for its craftsmanship which may not up to Oscar's caliber. But gaging from its stellar cast, a more probable upshot could be a fun-loving teamwork like OCEAN 11-13 fanfare, yet, it does't even achieve this lesser goal.
The film is hit or miss in coagulate its plain script with an aimlessly disorganized narrative, even during its climax it feels lagging and insipid. Obviously the execution is at a loss to define the picture's overall temperament, a war drama, or a lightweight comedy, or an ensemble piece of entertainment, it seems that Clooney wants to blend them altogether, but it boomerangs badly, it eventuates to be an ungainly nondescript, only if art cognoscenti can generate some faint buzz over the looted art treasures and groan what a trespass conducted by the execrable Nazis.
In the mid-1940s, a USA task force constituted by art experts and led by Clooney enters behind the enemy line to aim to retrieve millions of pillaged art pieces from the retreating German troops as many as possible, some of which are historic and significant. Yet, the story unfolds heedlessly, and even it is near the end of WWII, casualties are still indispensable, lives can be dispatched all in a sudden, but overall one tends not to care too much since the brains behind the film don't allow anyone to invest a deluge of emotional turbulence in it as a consequence of its wooden presentation of the historical matter and whimsically evasive editing choices.
Nothing too much can be commented on the cast although Blanchett can be perpetually singled out in any films she is in, among the Monuments Men, Murray and Balaban are borderline enjoyable, Goodman, Dujardin and Bonneville are half-heartedly dutiful, Damon and Clooney are just playing house in the war zone.
It is an 118-minute paean to the importance of preserving art, we get it, just a reminder, stopping bombarding is a nice precaution to this purpose, take that, all the radical militarists!