If only I could have forgotten how it was going to end I would have thought this one of the best of the year

Rating: 7/10 (6 January 2009)

Bryan Singers film about the plot to kill Hitler is a very good one. (SPOILERS AHEAD)
Wonderfully acted, especially when it gets going, it has one of the best ensemble casts I've seen. This is beautiful to look at with a real sense of being in the Nazi world. And it is at times a taut film about a plot to kill the Fuhrer (I know you can all here the "but" coming, so I won't disappoint you) BUT the film has one large problem, we know how it turns out.Forgive me for saying that unless you really don't know your history you know the plan fails and everyone dies. Short of them rewriting history there is one and only one way this can go, and its not really a happy one. This doesn't mean there is no tension, there is, it just means there are no surprises except in the details. For me the films inability to transcend the fact we know it ends badly keeps it from being a being a great film and instead making it only a good one. Its is possible to make a great film about a failed event, one need only look at Khartoum or the Alamo to see two films that hold you in such away that you forget the ending. Don't get me wrong its a good film, I just wish they had made me forget the ending at the start.(Counter point recent films where I knew the ending and didn't care or forgot it in the flow: Milk, Che, Frost/Nixon)