Bad History Makes Bad Movie. Again.

Rating: 4/10 (7 June 2009)

The British stage raped of its finest performers for a by-the-numbers American film: nothing new, and nothing particularly wrong with it either. It's nice to see Tom Wilkinson or Tom Hollander or Terence Stamp or Kenneth Cranham or Bill Nighy do anything, and I don't see as much London theater as I'd like. And you can't even say that Tom Cruise is bad in this thing, exactly, since he wisely does absolutely nothing except put on a uniform. While I suspect that he did this because he thought wearing jackboots might make him look taller (the scuttlebutt that he was attracted to the role because he thought he looked like Stauffenberg is amusing, in the sense that one devoted monomaniac would probably recognize himself in another), it is not a self-indulgent or incompetent performance that is the problem this time.
It's that the movie has no point. To entertain, a story must must must be about something more than its plot. Event has to illustrate theme. I have to learn something. JAWS isn't about a shark eating people, it's about people taking responsibility for their lives. VALKYRIE is about some Hollywood bigshots hearing a story about people facing responsibility, then turning it into an episode of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE. In this movie I learn nothing except a lesson I already learned several movies ago: don't let Chris McQuarrie write your movie, and if you do, don't let Bryan Singer direct it. Because you'll end up with, at best, a twisty-turny thrill ride with clever dialog that winds up as empty as a bottle of Bud at a tractor pull; at worst, a straight-ahead snoozeathon just as meaningless.
If I told you the story of Claus von Stauffenberg going from idealistic patriot to disillusioned warrior to outraged mutineer, you would have a chance at seeing a grown-up's vision of the German experience of World War II, a people coming to grips with its own capacity for evil. If you saw a thriller about a man who tried to assassinate Hitler and failed, losing his life in the process, you would have a chance at being entertained. But if you see this movie, all you'll get is a series of opportunities for very good actors to wring their hands and shout, in scenes whose only connection is that they may have happened in real life in more or less this order. There's nothing new here, no revelation, no greater truth: it's just a thrill machine that never starts because the finger that should be pushing the buttons is busy dialing room service. I've seen more drama in an hour at the laundromat.
Besides all that is the central bullshit factor. The movie presents its protagonist as an anti-barbarian, pro-Semitic, gentleman superpatriot whose outspoken criticism of Third Reich policies got him relegated to Tunisia. The record suggests otherwise. Claus von Stauffenberg had no problem annexing the Sudetenland and crushing Poland, and his attachment to the 10th Panzer division was in fact a promotion. He seems to have believed in Hitler as a positive force for Germany until Germany began to lose the war, and was repeatedly asked to take part in coup attempts and refused, until his own career was derailed by injuries.
Not that I'm saying the inclusion of any of this would have made a better movie. That would have required certain directors of comic book movies to hire writers who weren't their buddies, and for everybody to face his responsibilities in the manner that Stauffenberg finally did.