I only decided to watch this film because Robert Zemeckis directed it. I had seen it on the Netflix list many times before but thought it sounded dumb and therefore skipped it. After celebrating Back to the Future day yesterday, Netflix pointed out that Zemeckis was the director of this film also, so i figured I'd give it a go.
A very young looking Brad Pitt plays Max Vatan, A Canadian Wing Commander who is now a James Bond-type-dude traveling to Monoco to assassinate a Nazi German ambassador. He is joined by a French Resistance fighter named Marianne Beauséjour (Marion Cotillard) who is posing as his wife. They make a good team but their romance is completely fake for the sake of cover (at first.) They end up having genuine sentiment towards one another at the end of their "tour."
Max ends up returning to London to continue the war effort and eventually succeeds in getting his girlfriend over to England and they get married / have a kid. And this is where I don't think I should say much more about the plot because to do so would be to spoil the movie massively.
To me, this movie was for the most part, quite boring. The movie starts out with a brisk pace, and it feels like it will continue in such a fashion, but then from about minute 20 to minute 60 almost nothing happens except for a few brief battles scenes as the film takes place during the German bombing raids of London.
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Max's doting wife is also a complete bad-ass when the time is right
I found myself wanting them to "get on with it" during many parts of this film but that is just because they needed to fill the film with something to get to the obligatory 90 minute mark (its actually over 2 hours and i think at least 30 minutes could have been completely eliminated with zero impact on the story.)
It was quite humorous to see Pitt acting in French during some of the film. I presume he isn't fluent in the language and when all French dialogue is going on and his contribution to the conversation is "Oui" and "bon soire" before eventually segueing back to English. I have to admit that I find it annoying when we as the audience are expected to believe that a character can comprehend the foreign language going on around them fluently, but never speak a meaningful amount of it. I suppose we couldn't just expect Pitt to learn the entire French language in 6 months.
I suppose I would recommend this movie is you don't have much else to do (which is unlikely.) Mostly I think this movie can be placed on the back burner and saved for later. It cost an absolute fortune to make this movie and it barely made its budget back at the box office.