Sometimes when you wait too long to see a movie, the hype builds up and the film can't live up to your expectations. VALKYRIE works the other way. Watching this perfectly acceptable suspense film blow by in what felt like much less than its two hour running time, I coulnd't understand why the film had been so trashed in the press leading up to and just after its release.
Perhaps it is because of all of this bad-mouthing that VALKYRIE exceeded my expectations. Not to say that I thought it was a "great" movie. But it was easily a solid piece of history-based entertainment.
"Valkyrie" is the name of a back-up plan that would use SS reservists to secure Berlin should anything happen to Adolf Hitler. Amidst a significant handful of high-ranking Nazi officers who actually dislike Hitler, Colonel Claus von Staffenberg (Tom Cruise) tweaks the Valkyrie plan and takes the lead in what would be the 15th and final assassination attempt on Hitler's life (before he killed himself).
The fact that we all know how this was going to turn out doesn't spoil the intensity of the suspense in the film, and that's one of the good things that VALKYRIE has going for it. The other good thing is the support cast. Kenneth Branaugh, Bill Bighy and Tom Wilkinson are almost incapable of giving bad performanes. Throw Terence Stamp and a barely-noticable Eddie Izzard into the mix, and the acting here is rock-solid. It needs to be. When the audience already knows the outcome of a story, it's up to the actors' performances to convey a suspense that would be otherwise lacking. Mission accomplished here.
And then there's Tom Cruise. They ripped him to shreds over this role, not in small part for his American accent. Is it justified? Not really. Every actor here spoke in their native cadences, thanks to a slightly hokey trick employed by director Bryan Singer in the film's opening during which Cruise's character is speaking and writing in German and it morphs between sentences into English, a device that was a little too obvious in telling the audience "we're going to make this easier on you...you hate subtitles." Having said that, I can't think of any special reason why the film had to have accents. In the end, it's not worth fighting about. Beyond the voice, Cruise is surprisingly muted here, though his character calls for a man with steely interior and cardboard-cutout exterior. It didn't take me long to put Cruise out of my head as any kind of star in this film. It felt more like an ensemble piece to me, and that's a good thing. Cruise was fine. In fact, I've seen pictures of the actual von Stauffenberg, and Cruise looks much like him.
Bryan Singer teams up here with his "Usual Suspects" screenwriter, Christopher McQuarrie, and the team does a halfway decent job of allowing the audience to follow who's who and what the heck is going on. But that's about it. As I said, unashamed solid entertainment, but that's about it. Certainly a decent rental: a good looking film with action, suspense, good acting, and exciting history thrown in the mix.
3.0 out of 4
