Final verdict on The Monuments Men & Robocop

Every February in the Philippines, after an all-Filipino diet of films and TV shows during the Christmas holidays, the country turns to the imported variety and we join the crowd to pass judgment.

We have always been drawn to wartime tales as stories of this genre inevitably take ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances, and reaffirm the innate good nature of mankind. Like Schindler’s List or Casablanca, The Monuments Men (TMM) aims for the same lofty goal, but sadly falls a bit short. Based on a true story and book by Robert Edsel, TMM is written by Grant Heslov, and directed and co-produced by George Clooney.

It tells of how a band of art scholars, historians and curators heed a call to “protect what is left and find what is missing” of European art in the final months of World War II. Frank Stoles, curator at the Frogg Museum at Harvard University, takes his cause to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who gives him the green light to put together his group of unlikely soldiers. Their task, albeit noble, seems insurmountable at the time: To save Europe’s architectural and artistic heritage from destruction.

What they unearth in their quest for lost treasure is an astonishingly precise and systematic way, which sees Paris and other lands occupied by the Nazis being emptied of their art collections. Throw into the plot what was known as “Nero’s Decree,” wherein Hitler commands his retreating armies to raze to the ground everything in their wake, and our party of scholars find themselves in a race against time to save Europe’s stolen art.

The scenery is charming and the film affords the chance to be intimate with the masterpieces of brothers Jan and Hubert Van Eyck from the Netherlands who were among the best of the 15th Century, as well as a Madonna and Child sculpture by Michelangelo Buonarroti. The Oscar-winning cast is also A-List: Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, John Goodman and Jean Dujardin. While Blanchett falls perfectly into her role as the elegant yet stern curator of the Jeu de Paume Museum in a recently-liberated Paris, Murray and  Goodman mouth lines that seem out of place in this war epic, and more at home in a Murray comedy.

We imagine that the movie must have been painfully difficult to direct with so many Hollywood giants in one cast. But Clooney claims “they are all so comfortable with their own personas that they don’t need to own all the scenes they’re in.” The Monuments Men is a huge tale and we must applaud Clooney and Heslov for telling it. However, we found the film lacking in depth as it skimmed over the horrors of the war.

When a friend suggested we watch the film RoboCop one evening after dinner, we were not exactly ecstatic. Said to be the 2014 version of a reboot of the RoboCop film series, it is the fourth installment of the franchise. We watched it grudgingly for the first time, readying ourselves for a comic-book thriller, ending up instead with our eyes glued on the screen, and our hearts in our hands. It is easily an action drama with a heart.

With Joel Kinnaman in the title role of Alex Murphy, a police detective who is injured in an explosion and transformed into the cyborg RoboCop, we are made to understand that Alex is the perfect specimen for this combination of man-and-machine crime buster the city needs. Alex is told by scientist Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman) that he was injured when criminals under the payroll of the local crime boss planted a bomb in his car. With the consent of his wife, Joel is outfitted with the RoboCop body and software, which give him enhanced strength along with instant computing information in his brain.

His role as a crime buster initially works and the city is elated that they now have a superhero in their midst. But what the scientists fail to contend with is the deep devotion Alex has for his wife and kids, and when he is made to choose between his responsibilities, his human side will triumph.

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