Quite a lot, actually.
The film is caught between its natural inclination to be a serious art house piece and a commercial push towards all-American blockbuster. What should be most compelling is the horror of cultural loss; respect for these middle aged men, who could easily have sat out the war but instead risked (and is some cases lost) their lives; and amazement at how they managed to accomplish their mission with no resources and little official backing. That's all there, but it just doesn't hit the emotional mark.
Instead, the best bits of the film are comic. There are sparkling little scenes of witty banter. The cast plays off each other well and often look like they're having fun. You enjoy it, but can't help thinking this is just Clooney re-making Ocean's Eleven in WW2. And, let's face it, for anyone my age, all Bill Murray has to do to get laughs is to put on an Army uniform. The soldier he played in Stripes was stirring under that uniform throughout.
A bit of comic relief is great, but there was too much here. Some perplexingly unecessary. Matt Damon's character was closely based on real Monuments Man James Rorimer, an erudite and highly cultured man who'd studied and lived in Paris. Yet we felt the need to dredge up all the old stereotypical jokes of the Anglo-Saxon who can't speak French. A Francophile curator of the Met acting like a country boy in Paris just made no sense.
There are strange discontinuities like this throughout the film. Scenes supposedly set in the French countryside are blatantly, thanks to their distinctive architecture, filmed in the south of England. Damon's character, when we first meet him, is restoring a fresco portrait on the underside of a Roman arch; a strange combo I don't know to exist and an odd choice for someone who was supposed to specialise in the Middle Ages. It's been a while since I've been to Bruges, but I'm pretty sure that magnificent Gothic cathedral ... quite central in the plot ... does not have a massive Baroque organ and choir loft. The Jeu de Paume, another critical location in the story, is an instantly recognisable Parisian museum that most visitors will have walked by. (You know it: the long, narrow one on the corner of the Tuileries Gardens at the Concorde Metro stop.) In the film it is most obviously not the Jeu de Paume. Turns out, with strange irony, a museum in Berlin stood in!
Accuse me of being pedantic, but this is a film about art history. It's going to draw people like me. And the same people who are passionate about paintings and sculpture are going to notice these things.
It's not a bad film. It's entertaining, moves with a good pace, sheds light on a bit of history that deserves more attention and does its job on the "feel good movie" front. But it falls far short of its potential. You won't miss much if you miss the film. But you really should read the book. It's fabulous.
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