All’s fair to middling in love and war story

RUMOURS of a romance between its stars – although hotly denied – have generated unbelievable publicity for this resolutely old-fashioned wartime drama. Which is just as well since Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard’s latest effort tailspins from excellent to exasperating at times.

The setting is 1942 where Max and Marianne (Pitt and Cotillard) are Resistance spies posing as a French husband and wife in Casablanca, Morocco. Their seemingly impossible mission is to assassinate a Nazi ambassador, an operation that’s shot well enough to paper over its sheer improbability.

Job done, the pair fall for one other and quickly marry, moving to London and having a child. Their domestic bliss is shattered, however, when Max is warned his wife has been a German spy all along.

In the film’s final act, Max must work out just what’s true and what isn’t, with us, the audience, teased by a script that takes great delight in arousing and then dashing our assumptions.

Much of the credit goes to Cotillard, last seen in Macbeth, who makes for an intoxicating femme fatale whose mastery of the spy game and the double life it entails leaves us never quite sure of her true character.

Director Robert Zemeckis (Back To The Future, Forrest Gump and Flight) knows how to tell a good story and, for the first 90 minutes or so, sweeps you up into a thrilling world of action, intrigue and good old-fashioned romance.

Kudos also to the designers for recreating the period with such aplomb, with Max and Marianne the sort of dashing spies you’d once have seen in an Alfred Hitchcock picture.

Then, just as you think you’re in the presence of one of the movies of 2016, things start to go awry, with the set-up failing to match the pay-off as we learn of Marianne’s true motivations.

It’s rare that a film manages to pull off such a high-wire act these days but the last 30 minutes of Allied seriously, seriously disappoint.