You there! Visiting my blog, perusing my appraisals of films of your fancy - you're here for a reason, and that reason has nothing to do with the opinions of Pauline Kael or Andre Bazin or Roger Ebert. It has to do with the opinions of yours truly, and so you'll surely forgive me for putting those opinions first. Those opinions are founded upon tastes, those tastes upon some indistinct, indefinite parts of my psyche over which I have little control. And those tastes favour Robert Zemeckis' Allied, a solid, substantial work of canny craftsmanship that plays immediately into my favours - patient and suspenseful, yet twisty and thrilling. Steven Knight has a marvellous knack for writing screenplays that feel almost minimalist in their lean efficiency and stylistic simplicity, while Zemeckis' own taste for technical trickery enlivens the film without overwhelming it; his respect for classical storytelling techniques a far more apt and valuable attribute in Allied. It's Hitchcock-lite, but then isn't most everything in this genre? And this is a terrific example of adult entertainment (now now, not 'Adult Entertainment') in a modern market that often regards those two terms as mutually exclusive. You see, I have a taste for spy films, especially spy films like Allied. I like their narrative coyness, their aesthetic glamour, their purposeful action sequences - all only when done well, of course, which is largely the case here. And I like it when they're good fun, without necessitating that the viewer checks their brain in at the door. You want my opinion? Allied might just be Robert Zemeckis' best film.
