Allied - Movie Review

Starring Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Simon McBurney, Lizzy Caplan, Matthew Goode and August Diehl.
Written by Steven Knight.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis.

★★

Our two movie stars meet in Casablanca during World War II. Unfortunately they never swing by Rick's Casino, though director Robert Zemeckis has the technical know-how to make it happen if he wanted to. That might have been too on the nose.

Brad Pitt is Max, a Canadian serving in the UK's Royal Air Force, and a trained spy. He is to meet a French spy Marianne (Cotillard) in Casablanca and pose as her husband. They meet, they talk trade, they put on a good show for those around them, and their mission is to assassinate a German ambassador.

Though they pretend to be lovers, it is when the mission is over that Max decides he has fallen in love with Marianne and wants to marry her. It's a jarring scene when he proposes because up to that point, I'd had no hint Max was actually falling for her.

A wedding, a year, and a baby later, Max gets some bad news. Marianne is supected of being a German spy, and Max is to give her some false information to see if it gets transmitted out.

As both are playing spies, I was looking for hints of their layers. Where's the real person beneath the facade? I can say Cotillard gets there, but I never felt like Pitt did. The two just don't have chemistry together. It feels like it should be a sweeping wartime drama but it never takes off. It's actually all downhill after the assassination.