There are a zillion ways to quibble with Valkyrie--Nazis didn't, um, speak English; Tom Cruise is still a terrible actor; there's absolutely zero subtlety; and the climax is pretty damn anticlimactic--but these are mere speedbumps. This, for all my originally-high-and-then-later-on-very-very-very-low expectations, was a very enjoyable flick.
The brilliance of Singer's work in Valkyrie lies in the film's ability to convince the audience that Cruise and co. can actually pull it off. (They are trying to overthrow Hitler.) But obviously everyone knows that this didn't work; Hitler committed suicide later, in the face of foreign invasion--he wasn't killed by his own men. And yet there's a stretch of about forty minutes in Valkyrie where you're utterly enthralled, rooting the plot along. It really takes awhile before reality sets back in and you have an "Oh, fuck me" moment. But by then, the damn thing is nearly over.
This is a Tom Cruise movie as much as it's a Hitler movie. And Tom Cruise has some serious fucking screen presence. I mean, he is a really, really poor actor. But he holds together the entire thing, and I have no idea how he does it. Maybe this means I'm secretly in love with Tom Cruise, but I doubt it. All I know is that I could never look away when he was onscreen. In Valkryie, he's honestly not that different from his M:I-series character Ethan Hunt. It's a very Crusian performance--Tom is not Daniel Day-Lewis. But just as Tom Cruise is rarely very good in his roles, he's always very watchable. I've sat through Vanilla Sky and The Last Samurai and 103 viewings of Jerry Maguire--trust me, it wasn't the writing.
There are quite a few things I liked about this film. One was the very slick decision with how to portray Hitler. It's a "Hitler film," but it's not about Hitler. So they kept him mostly offscreen, fed him only murmurings for lines, and treated him like the omnipresent and omnipotent fascist he really was. It was a very nice depiction. Another great quality was the score: it's masterful. Pumping blood in every freaking scene, it just doesn't let up. Tons of bombast, but it's fucking World War II, so it's totally acceptable. But of course the score would be irrelevant without the fantastic pacing of Valkyrie. They just leap right into the thick of things. Tom Cruise gets horribly injured in Africa, he recovers, and boom, it's time to knock off Der Fuhrer. Nearly every scene thereafter is filled with tension. It's great fun.
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There were also myriad references to the, um, 400,000 other films that have been done on World War II and the Nazis. But this one--a tracking shot made from the back of a moving car--was one of my favorites. It immediately called to mind Leni Riefenstahl's work in the intro to Triumph of the Will and Spielberg's copying of it in Schindler's List (second and third pictures, respectively).
