$12.31 = $10.99 + $1.32 in tax. At the AMC River East 21, 6.15pm. There was an older bloke having a snore off to the right of row 4; I don't think he picked the right theatre to be doing that in.
Is this Saving Private Ryan in a tank? Are we here just to suffer through one more round of "greatest generation" propaganda? Or is this a cynical play at their 401(k)s, so recently crueled by their lesser successors? It certainly is a pastiche of earlier Brad Pitt vehicles. The plot is essentially a feature-length version of Fight Club's Raymond K. Hessel scene, here featuring Logan Lerman who looks like a young Depp, or McGuire. He'll probably be in the next Spiderman reboot. Pitt himself is a slightly more plausible Nazi hunter than he was in Inglourious Basterds, but when he rolls out "Let me show you something," I got the flashback shivers, just as I did from Norton a week ago. His minions hold him in a similar regard to that in which the natives held Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. Albert Einstein apparently said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones," but what he didn't understand is that Hollywood will finance both, and probably shoot them in 3D if the technology survives. Shia LaBeouf was decent. This movie is nowhere as claustrophobic as Das Boot.
Slightly more broadly, it seems a bit weak that Hollywood has to keep reaching back to the Nazis (the gift that keeps giving, it would seem), just like Jolie is going to show us how terrible the Imperial Japanese were, and the non-commie Russkies in John Wick sure were meaner than those commie Russkies. America is all out of new bad guys.
A. O. Scott cites more movies than I do. I agree, the blokes did some fine acting, but nevertheless I failed to develop an attachment to any of them. David Denby.