Valkyrie

Herald rating:

**

Verdict:

Ruthlessly efficient film about the failed plot to kill Hitler succeeds on its own thriller terms.

Forget Tom Cruise. What's with director Bryan Singer's thing for Nazis? He had Ian McKellen as an escaped one living next door in

Apt Pupil

and his

X-Men

had Magneto's back story in a concentration camp.

Well this time, he's up to his ears in jackboots - all the way up to the Fuhrer himself in a thriller based on the 1944 assassination plot and starring Cruise as ringleader Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who, according to this, not only planted the briefcase bomb but masterminded a plan inciting "Operation Valkyrie' to quell any loyalist uprising by the SS in the wake of his death.

Yes, we know how it turned out. And a little digging reveals it was one of many plots by disenchanted German officers as the war started going badly. Oh, and that the real von Stauffenberg was a Roman Catholic aristocrat who had his own funny ideas about Germany's place in history and that he wasn't exactly out to stop the Holocaust when he set the timer.

But that's history and this is a thriller, a plot-centric one which isn't about to spend much time studying the divided loyalties and less-than-heroic motivations of von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators.

Cruise's character is a simple God-fearing Good German realising the Third Reich must be stopped from within. That involves many a meeting with fellow officers of British accent. Some - like Bill Nighy and Eddie Izzard are the least scary Nazi officers on screen since Colonel Klink.

All of which at least means Cruise, eye-patch, missing fingers and all, is there to help shape the plot into a fairly conventional thriller of ticking timebombs, nailbiting identity checks, ringing hotlines shattering the silence and a brief pause to explain the Wagner reference of the title.

As such,

Valkyrie

offers quite a ride, especially in the final reels after the bomb goes off and the conspirators attempt their ultimately futile coup. But while it generates plenty of tension in its tangle of Iron Cross and double-cross, it lacks much else to remember it by.

If von Stauffenberg and his fellow resistance "heroes' have been consigned to a footnote of World War II history, it's hard to see how this clinical but watchable thriller will much change that.

Russell Baillie

Cast:

Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy Eddie Izzard

Director:

Bryan Singer

Rating:

M (offensive language & sexual references)

Running time:

121 mins

Screening:

SkyCity, Berkeley, Hoyts