..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Valkyrie
Directed by Bryan Singer

As history, this mile-a-minute account of the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg and his conspirators on July 20, 1944, may be somewhat deficient. Nor, despite an excellent cast and general fidelity to the facts, does it score very high marks as psychological/historical drama. But, as a high-gloss, high-powered, high tech (WW2 era) thriller, with real-life overtones, it’s often hell on wheels -- and I enjoyed it more than director Singer‘s vaunted (and somewhat overrated) X-Men series.

It’s slick; it‘s fast. And Tom Cruise s not bad casting. He plays Stauffenberg garbed in Nazi regalia he makes look as spiffy as Armani, and with his chiseled chin slicing forward and one piercing dark eye covered by a patch worthy of Raoul Walsh, he’s at least as interesting as he was in his ferocious comic turn in Tropic Thunder. Here, he‘s an unambiguous hero thrust into a super-noir nightmare packed with fascists, bombs, revolt and conspirators.

The movie is a nightmare and Stauffenberg and his cohorts (including Kenneth Branagh as Major-General Henning von Tresckow, Terence Stamp as Ludwig Beck, Bill Nighy as General Olbricht, and Tom Wilkinson in the film’s best performance as the sly double turncoat General Fromm) are a group partly quixotic, somewhat crazy and, in Fromm‘s case, slimy. (The movie doesn‘t spend much time characterizing their motives; many were conservatives and even royalists.) Hitler himself comes on (played by David Bamber) as a cold, silent ghoul -- reminding you a bit of Singer‘s Nazi horror movie Apt Pupil from Stephen King -- when what’s really scary about Hitler was his flirtatiousness and temper tantrums.

As the plot unwinds, you’re a little staggered by the complexity of the scheme, which involved hoodwinking the Army Reserve into taking over after Hitler is killed, supposedly by a bomb set by the one-armed, three-fingered Stauffenberg. (You can check he real-life facts in the insider‘s book To The Bitter End, retitled Valkyrie here, by conspirator Hans Bernd Gisevius, played in the movie by …..) But the narrative hooks don’t really dig in until the assassination day commences. It might have been better to start it up immediately and cover the earlier stuff in flashbacks.

That said, Christopher McQuarrie‘s script (his first collaboration with Singer since their best movie, The Usual Suspects) is a model of obsessive forward motion and knife-edge clarity. There’s nothing boring about Valkyrie. It just doesn’t leave you with enough. And that’s when you feel history, and Stauffenberg, are being short-changed.

-by Michael Wilmington

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