Valkyrie (12A)

Alison Rowat's Review

Strange days. Between The Reader (Kate Winslet playing a poor little illiterate concentration camp guard) and the forthcoming Good (Viggo Mortensen as a German professor who makes the wrong choice), entering a cinema these days can involve not so much hugging a hoodie as snuggling up to a Nazi.

It’s not an entirely fair summation of Valkyrie, since the characters in Bryan Singer’s wartime drama are meant to be good guys, of sorts. These upstanding officers and gentlemen, led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (played here by Tom Cruise) were behind one of the 15 known domestic bids to kill Hitler. Nor is Singer the kind of director who lacks nuance. The force behind The Usual Suspects and X-Men has delivered a slick, intelligent piece of entertainment that asks to be taken seriously.

And yet, and yet. There’s something undeniably weird about seeing the likes of Cruise, Kenneth Branagh and Eddie Izzard striding around in German uniform, quietly urging us to be on their side. It’s not funny in a risible, sub-Mel Brooks kind of way, although logic and the trailers suggested it might turn out like that. Valkyrie is based, after all, on a true story which had dreadful consequences. Even so, as a concept it’s fairly bizarre, like a flu-induced dream. Jerry Maguire? Jackboots?

To stifle any doubts from the off, Stauffenberg is introduced as a straight-down-the-line soldier and patriot. Stationed in north Africa, he confides to his diary that Hitler’s actions against civilians are “a stain on the honour of the German army”. After an air attack leaves him badly wounded, the colonel returns to Berlin and a desk job. It is the wounds he has suffered which give him the chance to get close to Hitler and his high command. No-one would suspect a war hero of wishing to wage war on his own leaders.

It is just as well Singer gets off to such a roaring start, because the rest of the first half gets bogged down. We know where the plot is heading, but before the movie can get there, the ins and outs of the plan must be explained and the dramatis personae introduced. What a lot of them there turn out to be, and all Brits to boot. Among the plotters are Terence Stamp’s suave financier, Bill Nighy’s nervy general, Izzard’s even nervier officer, and Tom Wilkinson as a time-server who just wants to be on the winning side.

If the intentions match, the individual motives remain unclear. Only Cruise’s Stauffenberg remains above suspicion on that score. As if to reassure audiences, Stauffenberg is seen pledging the closure of the concentration camps should the plot be successful.

With all his ducks in a row, Singer can finally get on with the action. The day of the plot is handled in a gripping fashion, with the action tearing back and forth from the Wolf’s Lair, scene of the intended deed, and Berlin, where the Army bureaucrats sit snug in their offices, waiting to hear if Stauffenberg has succeeded.

Cruise, as ever, is the man to watch. When it comes to narrowed eyes and purposeful striding, few can compete with old Cruise Control.

Though aiming for high seriousness, Singer can’t quite restrain himself from adding some Hollywood cheese to the meat. The scene in which Stauffenberg is greeted by his fellow plotters, all holding up a card to show they are with him, is borderline laughable. It is one of several moments which pull the viewer up short.

Once you step away from the straightforward action elements in Singer's film, a few things begin to look murky. For a start, the plot itself took place in July 1944. Hitler came to power in 1933. Weren't Stauffenberg and his fellow plotters cripplingly slow on the uptake as to the nature of the regime?

Such questions are kept at a distance, lest they spoil an old-fashioned tale of derring do, but they are important. In not addressing them, Valkyrie’s characters remain mere waxen figures around which an action movie has been assembled. History, especially of this period, can’t afford to be this detached.

Paul Greenwood's Review

It’s a bold move asking an audience to buy into a film where they know going in that the heroes will fail and that everyone will be executed at the end.

So it’s to the credit of director Bryan Singer that the inevitable outcome of Valkyrie doesn’t stop it from being a rattling espionage thriller, full of setbacks and tensions.

It stars Tom Cruise as a German colonel involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, with a first half of meeting the conspirators (Kenneth Branagh and Terence Stamp among them) giving way to a steadily unravelling plan. Even though it’s mostly uniformed men talking in smoky rooms, Valkyrie manages to hold the interest and even excite the viewer.

An on-form Cruise heading a terrific cast helps, as does the eminently sensible decision to have everyone speaking in their own voices as opposed to affecting a dodgy German accent.

It’s solid and unpretentious and if you can cope with knowing the final score beforehand, there’s much to enjoy.