Valkyrie
Review by Matthew Rodgers
There is nothing worse than an unthrilling thriller, and Valkyrie only just avoids being labelled as such. Its not the fault of this tight little movies construction by Usual Suspects director Bryan Singer, or the slightly faded star power of Mr TomKat as a patch eyed Nazi defector, it’s the underlying fact that the entire premise is based on an assassination attempt on the Chaplin tached spectre of evil, Adolf Hitler, and anyone who paid the slightest bit of attention in GCSE history will know that the he took his own life in 1945, thus negating the supposed tension at the plots core. Who do you think you are kidding Mr Singer?
Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the latest recruit of a daring and ingenious plot to remove Hitler from power that reaches to the very heart of the German hierarchy. By using Hitler’s own Operation Valkyrie – a plan put in place to stabilise the government should the tyrant be killed – a small band of resistance soldiers put their lives on the line to make their once proud country safe again.
The first thing you notice about Valkyrie is the decision to maintain the actors own dialects. Cruise begins his narration in fairly accomplished subtitled German before this morphs into his recognisable drawl and sets the standard for the rest of the film. Only the “really nasty bad guys” maintain their accents and it’s quite off-putting. Why not add a semblance of realism to the story by maintaining the German? Are we not in an age when Apocalypto and Crouching Tiger can succeed as subtitled movies? Yes it avoids any Harrison Ford K-19 calamities but the end result smacks of laziness, Branagh has done Shakespeare, Wilkinson is an Academy Award winner, so I’m sure they could manage a crash course in German.
Valkyrie also has pacing problems (perhaps from the constantly shuffled release date and subsequent re-edits) the result being an extremely slow plot hatching section, there are flashes of Singer style in there to maintain interest – a bombers raid accompanied by a vinyl spinning Wagner’s Valkyrie is excellent – it’s not until the operation begins that the film cranks up the pace and becomes a WWII version of 24 complete with regular clock watches in the bottom corner. It’s a ticking time-bomb final third that leads to a raw, expected, but unwanted conclusion of brutal honesty.
It helps of course that our so-called “hero” is embodied by the much maligned Cruise. Many have called his roles in Lions for Lambs and even his hilarious Tropic Thunder cameo, comeback turns, but did he really ever go away? It’s a sad state of affairs when an audience cannot disassociate the off screen persona from that of the character, and here it’s a role that drives the movie through muddled support (Branagh comes and goes, and as good as Wilkinson, Nighy et al are, they are all performing functionary roles) and lacklustre set-pieces towards an ultimately good, but considering the talent involved, disappointing outcome.
