The Mon­u­ments Men

March, 1945. With Paris lib­er­at­ed and the Rus­sians start­ing to draw the Iron Cur­tain, Hitler’s troops are slow­ly being squeezed into sub­mis­sion. Yet while FDR and Churchill have already cut the tips of their vic­to­ry sto­gies, for some World War Two is far from over.

The Mon­u­ments Men is the sto­ry of a snap­pi­ly-monikered, ram­shackle pla­toon who, at the tail-end of the con­flict, are shaped up and shipped out to main­land Europe with the task of retriev­ing vast quan­ti­ties of stolen art from the Nazis’ sin­is­ter grasp. Tri­umphant­ly drap­ing Old Glo­ry over the Third Reich’s tat­tered corpse to the tune of some five mil­lion works — includ­ing the price­less Ghent Altar­piece and Michelangelo’s Madon­na of Bruges — this is the kind of high-stakes trea­sure hunt that would set Indi­ana Jones’ whip twitching.

Only the Mon­u­ments, Fine Arts and Archives mis­sion real­ly hap­pened, though inevitably not all 400 of the men and women involved made it into George Clooney’s spir­it­ed but over-reach­ing his­tor­i­cal dra­ma. Here, Clooney him­self leads a sev­en-man recon team com­prised of muse­um cura­tors (Matt Damon, John Good­man), an art his­to­ri­an (Bob Bal­a­ban), an archi­tect (Bill Mur­ray), a Brit (Hugh Boneville), and a French­man (Jean Dujardin).

They may be more famil­iar with Matisse than Men­gele, but their bat­tle is not being fought on the front­line. With the Ger­man army hav­ing been ordered to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly destroy all evi­dence of the hid­den loot, which is des­tined for the pro­posed Führermu­se­um, it’s up to this brave septet to locate the art before it’s too late. And so they split up and spread out armed only with their exten­sive knowl­edge (and plen­ty of guns), deter­mined to rub salt in Hitler’s wounds.

Every­one plays their part game­ly, yet despite the chum­my chem­istry on offer in the win­ning pair­ings of Goodman/​Dujardin and Murray/​Balaban, the script rarely fiz­zles and cracks the way it should. There are some amus­ing lines, and the over­all feel-good tone is there, but Clooney and reg­u­lar screen­writ­ing part­ner Grant Heslov are too con­cerned with sign­post­ing every step of the mis­sion while delib­er­at­ing the wider ram­i­fi­ca­tions it will have on the long-term preser­va­tion of West­ern cul­ture. Even the mild­ly inter­est­ing moral quandary that under­pins the group’s exploits — is a piece of art worth a man’s life? — is over­played to the point of tedium.

Mean­while Cate Blanchett, fresh off the back of her career-best per­for­mance in Woody Allen’s Blue Jas­mine, is stuck doing an uncon­vinc­ing French accent while attempt­ing to give her sleuthing Parisian Resis­tance fight­er pur­pose beyond pro­vid­ing a con­ve­nient plot bridge while off­set­ting the bel­ly-slap­ping brava­do of her male coun­ter­parts. Blanchett’s inim­i­cal rela­tion­ship with a senior Nazi offi­cer ini­tial­ly shows promise, but she’s grad­u­al­ly mar­gin­alised to the extent that she miss­es out on the real action. Grant­ed it makes sense for her char­ac­ter not to tag along, but if you’re going to embell­ish a momen­tous chap­ter in World War Two his­to­ry, why not let women in on the fun?

The film’s sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty and chest-puff­ing patri­o­tism occa­sion­al­ly lands wide of the mark, too, although there are moments of real poignan­cy here (the image of Bill Mur­ray tak­ing a show­er brings a tear to the eye for all the right rea­sons), and sev­er­al gen­uine­ly sus­pense­ful scenes go some way towards cap­tur­ing the incal­cu­la­ble hor­rors of war. For all that this is a sin­cere if slight­ly old-fash­ioned retelling of a huge­ly sig­nif­i­cant event, how­ev­er, watch­ing Clooney and co give Fritz a rud­dy good trouser­ing ulti­mate­ly isn’t as grat­i­fy­ing as it sounds.