Director Robert Zemeckis On His Career And New Film ‘Allied’

Despite a couple of shootouts, Allied is not an action movie but a romance with an impending sense of dread as the plot navigates its way through twists and turns. And the pair performed it beautifully. There’s style aplenty, but a faltering third act ultimate flattens any substance.

Hollywood actor Brad Pitt and his French co-star Marion Cotillard bring their new movie Allied to Europe this week, hitting the promotional trail for the World War Two thriller. Naturally, she and Max end up playing their parts far too well, and not long after their mission is completed, they decide to transform their sham marriage into a real one.

Then again, she may not be.

Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard attend the UK Premiere of “Allied” at Odeon Leicester Square on November 21, 2016 in London.

Except it’s not a homecoming. They are experts in deception, play-acting, second-guessing and assassination.

“I want to reach simplicity and authenticity in every aspect of my life”, say Cotillard, who is a spokeswoman for Greenpeace.

Which is what they do. Their bliss lasts only until Marianne’s potential status as a double agent is presented to Max one day by a high-ranking SOE Official (Simon McBurney). (The rule of thumb in espionage is simple: Don’t fall for your co-spy.) But love does its trick. Unfortunately, unlike its two main characters, those key aspects never marry to become an Allied unit. “That’s how I’ve survived”, she says. What then? A bigger question than what Max and Marianne will do is: How will the filmmakers handle it? A bombing raid interrupts the party (complete with a burning plane that crash-lands very close to the house), which provides a bit of distraction, but now Max must know.

Marion Cotillard and Brad Pitt in Allied. “We’ll have to see what happens”. First, though, Marianne needs to coach Max in how to pretend he’s infatuated with her, in addition to coaching him to speak French with a correct Parisian accent. The conclusion is deflating.

Cotillard, a more chameleonic presence as well as a seasoned femme fatale (“Inception”, “The Dark Knight Rises”, “Macbeth”), fares rather better, to the point where she nearly seems to undermine the movie’s choice of perspective.

His famous fantasies include Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Back to the Future series. Here he sticks with conventional images but shoots them in a way that evokes older influences. And although the sex scene is beautifully shot and well-acted, Cotillard swears the process was as awkward as it was hilarious – even for pros like her and Pitt.

In a career that has made him a superstar, Brad Pitt has played a particularly broad range of roles – garnering Oscar nominations for some of his most unexpected: as an activist gone mad in Terry Gilliam’s “Twelve Monkeys”, a man who is aging in reverse in David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and colorful Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane in “Moneyball”. In the film’s best scene, M & M make love inside a auto during a sandstorm: It’s like Lawrence of Arabia as a date movie, or maybe The English Patient, only vehicular instead of aerial.

Directed by Oscar victor Robert Zemeckis and written by Steven Knight, the movie will be produced by Graham King, Zemeckis, and Steve Starke.