I’ll admit that I went into Valkyrie expecting to have to hold my sides from laughing so hard at Tom Cruise with an eye patch. I mean, look at that. Rumor has it the test audiences were laughing at the trailer and that director Bryan Singer went back and added scenes before Col. Von Cruise loses his eye.
That being said, Valkyrie isn’t all that bad and most of what’s bad isn’t Cruise’s fault. The character he is playing is Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the man that came damned close to assassinating Hitler. He’s a fascinating figure and shares a lot in common with Tom Cruise, so you can see why he wanted to play him. Stauffenberg was strikingly handsome, a talented guy, an alpha male and like Cruise, who is part of the Hollywood aristocracy, was a German Count. Cruise actually resembles the real guy.
But the movie goes wrong almost from the get-go. (Spoilers) In the opening scene, Cruise as Stauffenberg, is writing a letter and the voice over is in German. It sounds like Cruise doing the accent and it’s decent. Cruise strikes me as the kind of actor that would spend eight months speaking nothing but German if he had to, to get down his accent. But almost immediately, it dissolves into English. And even though Cruise is a really talented actor, Cruise in English just sounds like Tom Cruise and from then on its hard to see him as anything else than a guy in a costume. One of the scenes in the movie that’s actually true is when Stauffenberg tells his new assistant that he’s in the midst of committing high treason. Point blank he asks him to join him and he does. This actually happened, but with Tom Cruise delivering the lines it feels more like a “Cruisism”. Some needless bravado added to make the actor look cool. Most audiences are not going to get the feeling that Stauffenberg was actually that ballsy.
In Singer’s defense, the movie doesn’t suffer from lags or get over embroiled in details. I guess what it suffers from is the lack of details. Characters that were eliminated from the plot include Stauffenberg’s two brothers and the Grey Fox, Erwin Rommel. The latter of whom was given the choice of drinking poison or having he and his family executed. Rommel didn’t actually participate in the plot, but knew about it and never warned Hitler. Hitler tightened his grip on the German government after that, replacing all the key military posts with Nazi loyalists.
But even if you add all that, you don’t get a real sense of why the Germans followed Hitler up to this point. Part of the problem is, in most movies Nazis are nothing but moving targets for our heroes. In this movie, it’s crucial that we learn more about Stauffenberg and why he followed Hitler as long as he did. Read this encyclopedia entry for Stauffenberg. Interesting stuff, but most of it is not in the movie. Instead, Singer focuses on the events around the assassination attempt, which weren’t all that interesting. Basically, Stauffenberg waltzed in, left a bomb in a briefcase and got out before it exploded. Hitler was saved because he was crazy and crazy ol’ Hitler moved the meeting out of the bunker because it was hot. Had the bomb exploded in the bunker, the air pressure would’ve killed everyone. Had Stauffenberg placed the bomb on the opposite side of the large oak table Hitler was standing next to, it would’ve killed him. And, had Stauffenberg managed to get the second bomb in place, it probably would’ve killed him.
But big deal. We know going into it, Hitler doesn’t die from the assassination. What we need to know is how did Stauffenberg, a guy with balls of steel, manage to almost pull it off. What drove him to defy, as a German officer, Hitler during the height of his power? Also, you don’t get much of a sense of what Hitler did to guys who resisted. I guess Singer assumes most people will just remember that Nazis are really bad. But, if he’s relying on his audience’s memories of Nazis, most of them are movie memories. And movie Nazis are, for the most part, heartless, evil tools of oppression for Indiana Jones to foil and shoot. What we needed to see is how the Nazis were the German people in power, not the entire German people. I think it would’ve been a better movie had it centered around the life of Stauffenberg, the rise of the Nazis, his eventual downfall and less on Count Von Cruise shouting orders to other actors.
I give this movie 5 kegs out of 10.
