Directed by: Brett Ratner
Starring: Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Tom Wilkinson
Other Actors of Note: Eddie Izzard
Plot: Based on actual events, a plot to assassinate Hitler is unfurled during the height of WWII.
Ah, time to go milk the over-used and chapped teat of World War II for another movie. Well we've alreay burned out on heroic stories of Americans, Jews in concentration camps, and Russians fighting hard against Nazi invaders. So I guess we have nowehere left to go but to talk about the Germans.
From the beginning I have viewed "Valkyrie" as a rather pointless movie. At the end of the day, we know they didn't succeed in killing Hitler. History says they fucked up, so why am I sitting through an hour and a half of celuloid to watch someone not do something incredible?
Well "Valkyrie" does little to soothe that concern, it only helps in the fact that they come really close.
So anyway, the movie is about Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg a German army officer who is trying to save what's left of Germany from the inevitable shitstorm brought down by Adolph Hitler.
In the process of doing this deed, he gets himself horribly wounded. Upon doing so he joins the resistance that wants to overthrow Hitler and save Germany.
So the plan is simple, they're going to blow up Hitler with plastic explosives at a meeting. This is a dangerous mission acquiring the utmost precision and care, so naturally they asign it to the grizzled soldier with one eye, one hand, and three fingers.
Cruise fouls it up, but goes ahead with his plan anyway and almost manages to overthrow the SS before getting caught, then everybody involves gets shot and the credits roll. Huzzah!
It takes them the entire length of the movie to tell you what I told you in 3 paragraphs.
So, this being Tom Cruise's first film since his redemption in "Tropic Thunder," how does it hold up? Cruise gives a performance slightly less impressive than Vincent from "Collateral" but still better than most his career. He's really the only notable appearance in the film and he's proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that Marvel pictures need to give Samuel L. Jackson the shitcan and make Tom Cruise the new Nick Fury.
David Bamber is probably the first actor to ever play Hitler with a speaking part. Of course he looks like Walter Mathau circa "Dennis the Menace" and him having an American accent as the rest of the actors do makes him sound like Saddam Heussein from the "Hot Shots" films.
The biggest gripe I have heard is that this film is in English. It starts out in German but then slips over to English in the first 5 minutes, apparently hoping we wouldn't notice.
I wasn't bothered by this fact however as, like most Americans, I don't speak German. And if I'm going to go see an American movie with American (and British) actors I expect to hear them speaking English. If I want to hear German, I will watch a German movie.
The story tends to drag on, taking far too long to get where it's going in a half-assed attempt to build suspense. Of course you can't build suspense because if you have a rudimentary knowledge of history then you know they didn't make it.
There's also a line Cruise says during his planning about "shutting down the concentration camps" that struck me as more for the audience than anything. From what I've read about von Staffenberg and seen in the movie he didn't really give two tugs on a dead dog's cock about the Jews and might have gotten around to closing the camps after he'd taken control of all of Germany, but it certainly wasn't at the top of his list.
Unfortunately this movie seems long even though it's average length. A star studded cast gives an utterly lack laster performance, and by the end you just don't feel like there was any point to what you just watched.
All-in-all, "Valkyrie" is a very unexciting film that I'm having a hard time even being interested in enough to write a review. If this review seems lacking, blame the movie.
I give "Valkyrie" a 2 out of 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment