The problem with Valkyrie is really simple… it was a terrible idea when they started and nothing that a large group of very talented people did could overcome the core problem of this story. It’s a movie about a vain loser that doesn’t want to be about failure.
There is a way to make a movie about failure work. But that’s not what they were chasing here. It is supposed to make the audience feel like it was a valiant, heroic attempt, doomed to failure by fate. But in the effort to create a war time procedural of a coup – which is, again, the real story here... not some thriller about a plot to kill Hitler.
For the men of Valkyrie, killing Hitler is a means to an end. And the unfortunate element is that the eventual accusations by the state that the men behind this effort were more interested in obtaining power for themselves than in doing good don’t ring untrue… because the real stated goal of these men, to stop the war before the U.S. destroyed Europe utterly, is too ambiguous to really take hold in the middle of this drama.
But back to the loser…
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg means well… but he is a ***-up who gets people around him killed, over and over again. He is, in the end, exactly the kind of guy who you would not want to go to war with. He is so busy trying to do what he thinks is right that he barrels ahead without really knowing the reality he is facing. A well meaning jackass is still a jackass.
God bless Tom Cruise for wanting to play a one-armed, one-eyed cipher of a man. But he should have made this film with a European filmmaker on a European budget and put some real edge in it. Instead, he got an excellent filmmaker in Bryan Singer, who doesn’t do edge and does tricky, but not failure. Deadly mistake.
I don’t want to drag a cast of actors I really like through the mud, but much of the film played like a dated 40s movie with familiar Brits in funny hair and uniforms and an array of real non-English speaking Europeans trying to speak English (watch for the entire frickin’ cast of Black Book). In the end, I have to say, there is not a single performance in the entire film that I ever need to see again.
MINOR SPOILERS TO THE END
Finally, there is one major problem that dates this film completely, not unlike a movie about Brits killing off “wogs” being made now. If killing Hitler was all that important and they could walk a bomb into a room with Hitler without anyone looking in von Stauffenberg's briefcase (or presumably, the briefcase of any high ranking official who was allowed contact with Hitler), any man willing to die for what is repeatedly stated as being so very, very important, could have done the job at the expense of his own life with a gun, a knife, or even a bomb that stayed in that person’s control. Obviously, we are now engulfed with suicide bombers and this film is right around the time of the kamikazes. Perhaps that just wasn't seen as an option back then. But as in any film, we are meant to identify with the "hero." And me? I would have killed Hitler for the love of my country, my family, and hundreds or thousands dying daily at the hands of this man. Wouldn't you?
In this film, our hero is a man who has lost his arm, lost an eye, and is willing to risk his life to kill Hitler. Well... so long as risk means he might win in the end. By wanting to live more than to accomplish his task, he becomes just another loser talking big talk and not delivering. And worse, he then lies without knowing the full story, sacrificing others in his arrogance. (One character is sent away because he stands in the way with "too much" concern about the details... but turns out, if you think about it, to be much more right than our "hero.")
But it gets worse... we then spend nearly an hour on the post-Hitler-killing coup, where arrogant von aaS preens around like he is Al Haig after Reagan was shot. "I'm in charge... it's all okay... I'm in charge." He even hangs the guilt on another member of the team who actually wanted to be sure that Hitler was dead before putting more at risk. What a maroon! Except... he was right. And our hero was wrong. Oops.
Yes, the movie is “better than expected” versus some very negative buzz. But it is, in the end, not a good movie. And it was never going to be a good movie. For the tragedy of a failure to feel like a tragedy, the failure needs to admitted and, really, embraced. Failure needs to be the theme of the work, somehow. And here, they just looked the other way. Ach dung.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2008/12/review_valkyrie.html