The Cruise-ual Suspects

Rating: 7/10 (3 February 2009)

Most thrillers rely on a sense of mystery, that is the point of them - to thrill the audience to the edge of their seats wondering "what is going to happen next?" So how do you build a thriller around a story of which the audience knows the outcome right from the start? This is the case with Valkyrie, based on the conspiracy to kill Hitler by a group of his own Nazi generals, and I don't think any journalistic codes of ethics are being broken when I tell you that the plot fails. Not only that, but the film has been plagued by pre-release rumours and speculation about everything from test audiences panning it to critics writing it off before they had even seen it simply because Tom Cruise doesn't attempt a German accent. However, from this has been crafted a tense, engrossing war thriller.
Director Bryan Singer is back in the territory of his breakthrough film, The Usual Suspects: a group of plotters involved in a plan in which everything goes horrifyingly wrong. Throughout his career, from Suspects to first two X-Men movies (i.e. the good ones) and Superman Returns, Singer has never made a dud, so why pundits thought it would end up being so is probably the biggest mystery of the entire film. Along with the likes of Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson, Singer is one of the best in the business at shepherding an ensemble cast, and the way he does so here is one of the film's major strengths. He works masterfully in introducing us to the major figures in the plot, allowing us to tell them apart, explaining their roles and suggesting their differences and, to his credit, never allows proceedings to simply deteriorate into a star vehicle for Cruise, who provides a perfectly fine anchor for the story to centre around (say what you will about Tom, no one does defiant heroism like him).
The taut and crisply paced direction is aided in no small way by the skilfully efficient screenplay (from Nathan Alexander and Usual Suspects writer Christopher McQuarrie). The film is built around the idea that the biggest plans revolve around the tiny details, and it spares none of them yet still manages to make such a complex story coherent and seem almost straightforward. However, this almost complete submission to the plot does sacrifice attention to the characters.
Colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg, the man who engineered the entire plan, is clearly an interesting and complex character  a career military man and a Nazi who is willing to risk everything, even the safety of his own family, to kill Hitler, yet Tom Cruise never has the opportunity to play him as anything but intense and determined. We see the group discuss the morality of murdering Hitler rather than simply overthrowing him and whether the risk of the plot is worth it with the Allied forces looming over Belin, but we never find out why Stauffenberg, or any of the other members of the conspiracy, have gone from Nazi generals to deciding to rid themselves of their Führer. Although maybe the audience's own knowledge of history is supposed to fill in those plot points for us. Who needs a "reason" for wanting to murder Adolf Hitler?
With this knowledge of history in mind, it is perhaps surprising that the greatest success of Valkyrie is that there are still genuine twists. The makers of the film have been blessed with the fact that the details of the plot are still relatively obscure, so although we know that the bomb intended to kill Hitler did not succeed, it is the aftermath of this sequence which is the most intriguing. The plot fails at about the halfway point of the story, and I guarantee that everything that takes place afterwards will be news to you, and that despite yourself, you will end up on the edge of your seat wondering how it is going to end.
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