• Charlie Tate, Miami football coach, on the noise in LSU stadium: «It's the
kind of place that if the visiting captain wins the
coin toss, he elects to take the crowd.»
Allied is unusually linear, after the initial setup: Max is told he married a German spy in Marianne; against orders and behind Marianne's back, he sets out to disprove it.2 The apologist urge is to call it a maturation
of Zemeckis's style, to tell a story so simply and economically (even if we've
kind of been here before with Cast Away), but the film feels conspicuously underdeveloped as opposed to streamlined, to the extent that the big reveal seems as if it was decided on a
coin toss; it's easy to imagine the opposite outcome without any sort
of retrofitting to accommodate it.