Tom Cruise and Valkyrie

I attended "Valkyrie" with my oldest son yesterday afternoon.

I've read three reviews so far, and we find a consensus in this limited sample that Valkyrie's strength is its grand scale and director Bryan Singer's skill in keeping things moving when little fast action fills the screen.

Manohla Dargis at the New York Times hits on the main theme I've heard from the man-on-the-street scuttlebutt: Tom Cruise's performance, with his American accent, falls short in its portrayal of German aristocrat and officer Claus von Stauffenberg. Dargis discounts the movie's historical benefits, but her mildly offhanded take on Stauffenberg makes an interesting comment on the film's fabulous cinematography:

He’s a complex character, too complex for this film, which like many stories of this type, transforms World War II into a boy’s adventure with dashing heroes, miles of black leather and crane shots of German troops in lockstep formation that would make Leni Riefenstahl flutter.

The reference, of course, is to Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," but actually we don't see Nuremberg-scale rallies in Valkyrie, rather instead are crisp troop line-ups, and especially an attention to detail in German military uniforms, and the combination together provides a panorama of historical significance that I'd like to see more at the movies.

At the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan make a grudging case for the movie's excellence, suggesting the offering's "a perfectly acceptable motion picture." Perhaps the Wall Street Journal's roundup up of late-year Oscar contenders puts it best, stressing the film's historical value:

Two dramatic arcs intersect in "Valkyrie," a big, old-fashioned action adventure starring Tom Cruise as Claus von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic German army colonel who, in 1944, led the July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In addition to the plot itself, there's the arc of Mr. Cruise's career, from "Risky Business" to the riskier business of embodying an authentic German hero in a lavish English-language production with limited suspense; the audience - at least some of it - knows that the plot failed. So how does the film work? Well enough, in the end. Mr. Cruise's performance turns out to be brisk and reasonably plausible, though unexceptional, while the production as a whole succeeds as an elaborate procedural, impressively staged in historical locations ....

Once the plotters plunge into action, though, "Valkyrie" becomes both an exciting thriller and a useful history lesson. Younger members of the audience may not have known that the Nazi army's officer corps contained nests of determined resistance to Hitler's madness.

Video Hat Tip: Great Satan's Girlfriend.