History told Hollywood style.

Rating: 6/10 (15 August 2009)

Well, this movie was a bit of a disappointment. It had all of the right ingredients in it needed to make a great and interesting movie with but yet it really wasn't one. It had Tom Cruise, Bryan Singer as director, a fascinating and a based on true events story but the movie just made some wrong choices in the process.
The movie really isn't handling its story very well. Instead of telling the story honest and with respect it tells it spectacular and overblown. The movie is too Hollywood-like for its story and the real story and characters deserved a better treatment.
But even so, the movie is trying to be Hollywood-like, it yet doesn't even fully succeed in this neither. The movie just isn't spectacular enough to watch for this. There aren't any big shoot-outs or a spectacular ending in which everything reaches a conclusion. There often is more talking than action, so I actually have no clue at which audiences they were aiming. Singer made the same mistake before with "Superman Returns".
The movie also made a bad choice with its casting. Nothing wrong with Tom Cruise in his role, even though its also far from his most memorable one but casting some very British actors in some very German roles was simply a horrible choice. The accents did really bother and it was often quite laughable hearing a high placed German commander talking with a very thick British accent. Especially Hitler's voice really bothered me. Sure, the actor that played him (David Bamber) looked well enough like him but he sounded absolutely nothing like him at all. For all I cared they should had called in something to dub his voice but they didn't even bothered with it. It's a shame that most actors feel so out of place within this movie, since the movie does certainly feature some great actors in it, such as of course Tom Cruise but also Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp and Thomas Kretschmann, among many others.
It's of course a good looking movie and it's also put together professionally with its directing, editing, cinematography, music and such and it also certainly wasn't a cheap movie to make but this simply does not make the movie better or more interesting to watch. It just prevents it from being a total disaster to watch and gives the movie more than enough to still consider this simply a watchable one.
6/10
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