Do you know what would be awesome? If Tom Cruise tried to kill Adolph Hitler! Wait, some dude named von Stauffenberg who happened to be a slick, good looking Nazi Colonel tried to do that with a bomb. Really? Here’s a check for $75 million. Make it happen and make sure Cruise looks good with no hand and an eyepatch.
Tom Cruise is an actor, or movie star, if you prefer, far more associated with action and stunts than historical dramas, especially in the latter half of his career. Generally speaking, he runs a lot, drives cars, flies planes and helicopters, hangs from cliffs or the ceiling, jumps from buildings, and the like, but rarely has he done so in a period setting. Across 48 films, there are only a handful such as Far and Away and The Last Samurai, if you exclude fantasy or magic oriented fare like Interview with a Vampire. Therefore, it was somewhat of a surprise at the time when he chose to play a Nazi Colonel in 2008’s Valkyrie, much less a true story of a disfigured Nazi missing a hand, several fingers, and wearing an eye patch who attempted to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Guilt, moodiness, pathos, uncertainty, and unfolding tragedy is not normally considered part of the Tom Cruise lexicon, forget any potential association with historical atrocities on the scale of the Holocaust. Rarely is he put in a situation where his trademark smile, near supernatural skills and focus to complete the mission at hand, and cocksure attitude cannot save the day. Valkyrie, however, opens with Mr. Cruise stationed in North Africa unable to save anyone, even himself. He, portraying Claus von Stauffenberg, an actual historical figure, has a crisis of conscience, questioning – in German at first – how Germany as a whole has been corrupted under Adolph Hitler. He soon concludes that his loyalty lies with the motherland itself and the men serving under him not the Fuhrer, but his unit is ultimately attacked by Allied forces. Mr. Cruise tries to save one of his men, throwing a wounded soldier in the back of a jeep, but before he can escape, the jeep is strafed by machine gun fire from an attacking plane. He awakes in a military hospital some days later, suffering the injuries mentioned earlier, and determined to take down Adolph Hitler. Colonel von Stauffenberg was a real person – in fact his wife lived until 2006 and some of his children are still alive as of this writing – and the film depicts real events, but complicating matters further, we already know the ending. Mr. Cruise and his conspirators are doomed to fail, meaning the audience is watching the equivalent of Titanic save for even more gruesome deaths at the hands of the Nazis. It’s as if Top Gun featured an alternative ending where Maverick was shutdown by the Russians and we now it the entire time, but somehow Mr. Cruise and director Bryan Singer of The Usual Suspects fame make it work far better than it should in principle, not an easy trick to pull off by any means.
They do so rather ironically by making it a Tom Cruise film rather than the more traditional period take, a decision that did not please some critics, more on that in a moment. Mr. Singer, wisely in my opinion, chooses not to show us anything we don’t already know from high school history, eschewing the usual exposition that drowns many a modern film and keeping the focus on the action at hand, transforming what could have been a historical drama into a hard boiled thriller. Rather than dwell on why Colonel von Stauffenberg and his team want to kill Hitler in the first place or what will happen to them if they fail, the film begins with the assumption that the audience is well aware of the stakes and needs little backstory to understand why assassinating Hitler would be a positive development for Germany and the world. We meet Kenneth Branagh’s Major General Henning von Tresckow in the middle of a previously failed plot shortly after the opening sequence with Mr. Cruise’s von Stauffenberg, one which deftly suggests there is a small German resistant to the Fuhrer’s rule without spelling out all the details. Hitler arrives at an airfield where von Tresckow and an accomplice attempt to plant a bomb on the plane, hoping to blow it up on the return flight, but the bomb fails to go off as planned leaving them wondering if they have been found out and what horrors may result. The Major General manages to cover his tracks, traveling to Berlin to get the bomb back from its hiding place in a box of liquor in a typically tense sequence, and yet finds himself in need of another plan and someone to carry it out. As he puts it, “We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.” The audience is not surprised that this quest leads them to Cruise, recovered from his injuries but permanently disfigured and devoted to toppling Hitler for the sake of the future of Germany. From there, the lean and tight two-hour runtime is almost exclusively devoted to the machinations of the new assassination plot, a plan introduced by von Stauffenberg himself that addresses both the need to eliminate Hitler himself and prevent the machinery of the German government from being taken over by his top henchman, who are perceived as being even worse than the Fuhrer if that were possible. They hope to do so by using a reserve army to take control Berlin after Hitler’s death, taking advantage of a contingency plan known as Operation Valkyrie that deploys the reserves to arrest top officials in the event of a coup.
Mr. Singer unfolds the new plot as a series of darker, more moody Mission: Impossible style set pieces where the objective to be achieved is known in advance and the action follows Mr. Cruise, ever at the center of events, completing the action. First, he must get Hitler to sign off on an updated version of Operation Valkyrie. Then, he must smuggle a bomb into Hitler’s command center, complete with an old-fashioned acid timer that could go off in anywhere from ten minutes to a half hour. After, he must ensure the control of Berlin and convince the approaching Allied Army that Germany is ready to surrender without Hitler at the helm. He is aided by an all star cast that includes Terrence Stamp, Bill Nighy, Kevin McNally, Eddie Izzard, and Tom Wilkinson in addition to Mr. Branagh, all of whom are capable of crafting something resembling a real character out of a few lines of dialogue, taking little tidbits and turning them into something meaningful and memorable, pregnant with dark possibilities. This allows Mr. Singer to take advantage of Mr. Cruise’s natural intensity as an actor. Von Stauffenburg is not the smiley, cocky incarnation of the character, but neither is he something from Cruise we have never seen before. Instead, he is presented as a man willing to risk his life and that of his family for a cause he believes is just. Like most Tom Cruise roles, von Stauffenburg doesn’t waste a lot of time with existential questions or regrets. We know from the opening scene that there is more to him than the movie has chosen to show. There are hints that he was once a loyal and valiant military man who has become disillusioned, but in the context of the movie itself, a brief conversation with his wife who informs him that she understands the risk he is taking and agrees, is all it takes to prompt von Stauffenburg into motion from which he cannot stop until the very end. Knowing what this end must be only makes the final third more poignant and haunting, when Cruise succeeds in planting the explosive, witnesses the bomb going off, and believes Hitler is dead. The structure allows Mr. Singer to imbue normally mundane occurrences with tension in these two primary sequences, one where Hitler is gone before they can plant the bomb and another where Mr. Cruise has difficulty setting the timer due to his missing hand while Hitler-aligned Nazis are literally banging at the door. The simple sight of a leather briefcase with a bomb inside being shuffled under desk takes on thrilling new meaning.
Afterward, the movie makes the most of our ability to become invested in the outcome when the plan to take advantage of Operation Valkyrie is a success at first and we can almost – almost – imagine a what if scenario. If the bomb had been a couple of feet closer, would all of history be different? Of course, that can never be and the entire conspiracy comes crashing down as it must when the reservist charged with arresting Minister Joseph Goebbels places him on the phone with Hitler himself, who has miraculously survived the blast unscathed as he did in real life. The reservist realizes he’s been duped, and moves to arrest von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators instead. Mr. Stamp and Mr. Branagh commit suicide. Mr. Cruise and others face a firing squad. It’s the ending we assumed would happen from the very beginning, but not necessarily less of a punch to the gut because of it, especially as von Stauffenberg is typically Tom Cruise, convinced of his own success for time even as we know he failed. Valkyrie originally premiered to mixed reviews, earning a 65% rating on the aggregator site, Rotten Tomatoes. The dissenting critics generally took issue with either the Hollywood thriller feel of the film, or the casting of Mr. Cruise himself. James Christopher, writing for Times (UK), for example, claimed “Singer makes a noble and romantic fist of this terrific story but it feels spookily like a well-oiled Hollywood entertainment rather than a sensational chapter of history.” Jason Best from Movie Talk revisited it in 2020 and noted, “Valkyrie isn’t a disaster, but I’d rather have seen a different telling of the story.” Matt Soergel of the Florida Times Union summarized it this way, “Singer can only touch on the surface of each development. It would help if we could see the failure reflected in von Stauffenberg’s one good eye, but Cruise, alas, can offer little help. He’s just Tom Cruise in an eyepatch.”
There is some truth to that, albeit a truth I would consider misguided. The film, in my opinion, largely succeeds because of this not in spite of it. Mr. Singer could’ve crafted a traditional historical drama. He might’ve extended the run time to learn more about the characters or to drive home the atrocities of the Nazis. He could’ve even explored more of the political dynamics underlying Hitler’s dictatorship, but what would have been the point? That would be telling us what we already know or diluting the visceral nature of the risk all of these men took. To a large extent, who they were doesn’t really matter. As Stanley Kubrick’s epic Barry Lyndon closes with, “they are all equal now.” What matters and is most interesting, to me at least, is that there were at least 15 failed attempts to take out Adolph Hitler, attempts that most people have never heard of until this film. Mr. Singer’s choice to tell this a thriller and center on the intensity of Tom Cruise enables the audience to experience one of these attempts for ourselves, feeling the risks they took rather than having them explained to us as we might learn in a history book. It’s a daring choice and not typical for the subject matter or the central star. It also works in large part because Mr. Cruise himself, like Clint Eastwood before him, is a far better actor than usually given credit for, having an uncanny ability to bring the audience along for the ride whatever ride that is by making it their own no matter the subject. Here, he plays the role with the intensity and commitment he’s long been known for, holds his own in legendary acting company, and somehow manages to do justice to the character while still making it a Tom Cruise film. The result is a largely unique experience, impossible to turn away from, illuminating a unique piece of history, while rolling forward like an action thriller. Personally, I told my lovely wife that I would’ve loved to have been in the room when this was conceived. Do you know what would be awesome? If Tom Cruise tried to kill Adolph Hitler! Wait, some dude named von Stauffenberg who happened to be a slick, good looking Nazi Colonel tried to do that with a bomb. Really? Here’s a check for $75 million. Make it happen and make sure Cruise looks good with no hand and an eyepatch.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 