The Monuments Men

Grade: C

The Monuments Men was a neat idea that just didn’t work. It is a clumsy hodgepodge of moments that all too easily reminded me of other movies, some of which had actors from this one. Director George Clooney has assembled an impressive cast, including Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, and Bob Balaban. They work well together, when they are together. Only Murray and Balaban have much of a chance to make an impression. I was going to say that I’d love to see a spinoff with those two characters, but I feel like I already did. They seem to have the most screen time. At the beginning, Clooney recruits Damon to be a part of his team, and then there is a montage set to upbeat music of him recruiting everyone else, followed by a scene where everybody is assembled in a meeting led by Clooney, where he runs them through what’s going to happen, with a video projector as a visual aid. Sound familiar? (In their defense, they are a couple of oceans away.) Early on, when we are shown an elaborate small-scale white model of downtown, all that was missing was a tiny flaming DeLorean and a frantic Christopher Lloyd trying to put it out with a fire extinguisher. When Bill Murray has a dental procedure done, it hearkened back to his cameo as the masochistic patient in Little Shop of Horrors. The business with the gold bullion made me think of Three Kings. When Matt Damon steps on a land mine that has yet to explode, it was like Danny Glover’s dilemma on the toilet in Lethal Weapon 2 (though not as much of a moving experience here). I could probably go on, but I stopped taking notes after these 5 “homages.” For a movie that’s about men who recover stolen works of art, this one sure does a lot of “borrowing.” Grade: C