Valkyrie

 Confession – I like Tom Cruise. I like him as an actor, and don’t really give a crap about his personal life. But, when the first production still of Valkyrie emerged with Cruise looking like a midget Nazi from a Marx Bros. film, I had my doubts.

Valkyrie has the very briefest of introductions – a scene in Africa showing how Tom Cruise picked up his infamous eye-patch, before diving head-long into the meat of the story without any buildup. A true story (that it proudly trumpets in both German and English) of an assassination attempt (one of many) on Hitler led by Claus von Stauffenberg, it very ably weaves tension around an event that every person in the audience (presumably) knows didn’t happen.

The opening scene in Africa is quite inauspicious, actually. Director Bryan Singer stated that he had all the actors retain their native accents so that it doesn’t distract from the film, but it still takes some getting used to, especially as it started by segueing from a weary German voice-over to Tom Cruise’s English one. For the first quarter-ish hour, it’s like Mr. Top Gun is trying to do a Prince Harry and masquerade as a Nazi.

But then, the weirdest thing happened. Even though it was a bunch of Brits and an American running about and had Hollywood-y moments sprinkled about, the film essentially… got better, both because of getting used to the accents, and because the story was capably stream-lined, bereft of flab outside of the assassination plot.

Wisely, the assassination attempt on Hitler is positioned not as the climax, but in the middle of the film. Even with history providing the answer to how the attempted coup panned out long before the film does, it was still quite gripping, as I found myself lost in the moment and tethered to the film’s timeline, and not looking forward in time to the ultimate fall. As the inevitably tragic final act unfolded, I was hoping that perhaps it had been successful, just maybe it’ll all be alright in the end, and all while knowing full well that it wouldn’t.

It was that rare main-stream big-budget film that actually grew on me as it progressed, though it was no coincidence that as the film went on, the actors settled into their roles, especially Cruise, who now having things to do, rather than mug for the camera and spit patriotism, stopped being Cruise and became Stauffenberg.

Given its troubled production history, bouncing around of release dates and rumours of an utterly horrific German-tinged English accent of Tom Cruise flagellating the audience, the main surprise in Valkyrie was probably just how good it turned out in the end.