Cruise out of control

 

 

War movies always have to walk a fine line between amplifying the big-bang-big-canvas war action and portraying the things that go behind the scenes and inside the heads of the generals who command it. Bryan Singer’s “Valkyrie”, about a plot to kill Hitler in 1944 tries bravely to walk the middle path and ends up, well, middling. To his credit, Singer does do a good job of injecting suspense into a story whose outcome is obvious (the plot failed and the protagonists were executed) and well-known. Nazi Germany and the fermenting sense of revolt among some of the senior commanders over Hitler’s lunacy draws you in, but that’s about where the disappointments begin.

The biggest one is Tom Cruise; it’s said that Cruise was interested in the role of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (the ‘brains’ behind the plot) because he resembled the German a lot. If only he’d acted as well as he resembled him. The cardboard quality of Cruise’s emoting ruins some of the intensity that an otherwise terrific ensemble cast builds. In fact the lack of character development (so important for a thriller to hold its ground) ends up making the senior men (Terrence Stamp, Kenneth Branagh and Tom Wilkinson among others) appear more as History channel reconstructions rather than protagonists of a key moment in the war in flesh and blood.

“Valkyrie” tells a story worth knowing about and as a purely popcorn thriller, it perhaps even succeeds. But its greatest weakness is much the same as the original “Valkyrie” plot – a lack of definitive direction and intensity.