The film tells about a platoon established reluctantly in World War II by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a secretly penetrating task to Germany to retrieve artworks from Nazi soldiers and return them back to true owner. This is a almost impossible task when this art treasure deep inside enemy defenses and the Nazi is ordered to destroy everything when the third Reich collapsed. How can these reluctantly agents - including directors, sculptors, and historians accustoming with Michelangelo artworks more than holding a gun - perform the task successfully?
Unfortunately, it doesn't take much for charming camaraderie to cross over into uncritical cronyism. Clooney could have used someone telling him to do a few more rewrites. If he's not careful he'll turn into a classier version of Adam Sandler.
The movie does a good job of illustrating why protecting art from the Nazi scourge was important but it's far less effective fleshing out the personalities of the people who did the protecting.
Think of them as Inglorious Art Historians. Only this PG-13 entertainment has little of the edge, however complicated, of Quentin Tarantino's 2009 Holocaust revenge flick.
Washington Free Beacon
July 14, 2016
The movie's biggest sin is a complete and utter lack of dramatic tension.
If The Monuments Men never overcomes its unwieldy structure and unevenness of tone, the film still manages to make a profound, even subtle point: that Hitler's darkest impulses and annihilating reach extended from human beings to history itself.
'Monuments Men' is the vapidly-told story of the men who set out to thwart ol' Schicklgruber's (Hitler's father's real name) dastardly, top-to-bottom European art-ransack.
This latest project from the Lake Como Vanity Project Yacht is all winky Ocean's 11 crap and way too many monologues from Sir George, whose film career has been coasting on alleged charm since Return of the Killer Tomatoes.
We may have gained something in humor by not taking the saviors in the art-rescue story very seriously, but we've lost just about all of the romantic pleasures of heroism.
