THE MONUMENTS MEN (Rated PG-13)

Fighting the Nazis to save Western civilization? How can you miss with such easy targets as Adolf Hitler and his uncivilized henchmen embarked on a mission to destroy art treasures that define the very essence of European culture?

Assembling a hardy band of soldiers to go behind enemy lines during World War II should be something like “The Dirty Dozen.” The result would have been plenty of high stakes action.

On the other hand, “The Monuments Men,” directed by and starring George Clooney, is more like “Ocean’s Eleven,” yet mostly absent the tension and excitement of a Vegas casino heist caper fraught with peril and fear of failure.

Of course, another slight problem for creating daring wartime exploits is that the experts of the art world are older guys who have the professional background and necessary grounding in cultural affairs that would elude the typical draft-age Army recruit.

Based on Robert M. Edsel’s bestselling nonfiction book “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History,” the film is intended to be a true account even though the names of the principal figures are pseudonyms.

Sanctioned by the American government, as President Roosevelt and General Eisenhower came to understand the importance of saving cultural heritage, a group of middle-aged and out-of-shape of art historians, architects and artists was organized.

The answer to saving cultural treasures was the formation of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) group, in which George Clooney’s Frank Stokes, a leading art historian at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, was a natural leader given his wartime experience in World War I.

Stokes organizes a group of like-minded individuals, who are too old to be drafted or serve voluntarily as soldiers, but since they may come under fire, they have to go through basic training.

Stokes is joined by Matt Damon’s art expert James Granger, John Goodman’s sculptor Walter Garfield, Bill Murray’s architect Richard Campbell and Jean Dujardin’s art dealer Jean Claude Clermont, a French Jew based in Marseilles.

Other members of the group include the colorful Hugh Bonneville’s British aristocrat Donald Jeffries, a flawed man seeking a second chance, and Bob Balaban’s art historian and theatrical impresario Preston Savitz.

The only real soldier and young person in the MFAA group is Dimitri Leonidas’ Sam Epstein, recruited because he speaks German, knows his way around the battlefront and comes in handy as the driver.

As to be expected from past film outings, Clooney affords his character and that of Matt Damon several opportunities to engage in playful bantering, even though they remain earnestly serious about the mission.

Damon’s Granger gets extra comic mileage with his mangling of the French language, which he apparently learned in Montreal, to the point that no French person wishes to engage him in their native tongue.

The Monuments Men find a valuable, if somewhat wary and skeptical, ally in occupied France with Cate Blanchett’s Claire Simone, a curator at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, which the Nazis had converted to a warehouse of stolen art works.

Risking her life to secretly catalog the locations of pilfered art, Simone wants to be sure the Allies won’t simply keep the recovered masterpieces for their own collections of art.

In the late stages of the war, fearing his own demise and Germany’s loss, Hitler issued the so-called Nero Decree that everything the Nazis had amassed was going to be destroyed, so that nothing would fall into the hands of the victors, including the art treasures.

Understanding the implications to civilization, Granger and Simone forge an unusual bond, not a romantic love one, but rather a mutual love of art and culture, along with a passion to save masterpieces for a noble reason.

Not satisfied with being the catalyst behind the Monuments Men mission, Clooney’s Stokes also gets the benefit of uttering the most exalted dialogue, sermonizing about the great value in a civilized world of saving art treasures.

“The Monuments Men” arguably could have used more action and excitement, but then this is not a war epic. A sense of urgency to saving the priceless works of art is the film’s saving grace.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.