'Valkyrie' review

Tom Cruise (Credit: MGM)

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German soldiers disillusioned with Hitler’s appalling agenda plot to kill him to save human lives and defend Germany’s honor. Leading the charge is Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise), whose combat injuries result in the loss of a hand, a few fingers and his left eye, over which he wears a patch. Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh and Tom Wilkinson co-star.

The buzz: What, you don’t believe the all-American Cruise—who also executive produced—can pull off playing a WWII-era German? Despite the appearance of some possibly unintentional laughs, “Valkyrie” at least comes from director Bryan Singer (“X2”), who’s no slouch around an action sequence.

The verdict: Talk about casting sabotage. While “Valkyrie” is already filled with largely varied accents, Cruise’s complete non-Germanness is so distracting that it seems like the rest of the cast is thinking, “Who let this guy in?” It would have been only slightly more ridiculous to cast him as Hitler. Singer's direction solidifies the courage needed to disobey such an imposing government—ideas that prevent “Valkyrie” from becoming a complete joke. But the film doesn't clarify the different roles of Stauffenberg and his accomplices, the national temperature at the time or the death and destruction that’s occurring as the plot’s unfolding. Without a sense of reality or history, a too-basic sense of good and evil and a few accidental chuckles, “Valkyrie” is simultaneously serious and goofy. It plays like the wrong product in the right package, as if someone slipped barbecue sauce in the ketchup bottle.

Did you know? General Fromm (Wilkinson) says that when a situation provides no clear course of action, the best thing is to do nothing. What fun is a life making only “informed” decisions?

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