High stakes, high tension: Riveting WWII thriller a must for history buffs

“Valkyrie” pits Tom Cruise against Adolf Hitler in what at first blush sounds like a particularly surreal title bout in MTV’s claymation smackdown series, “Celebrity Deathmatch.”

Casting the Tominator as Count Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the German army officer who led a near-miss plot to assassinate Der Führer in July 1944, was almost enough to sink a production that was rife with public troubles — many stemming from Cruise’s affiliation with Scientology, which gives the German government major heartburn.

In the end, director Bryan Singer delivers an impressive final product: crisp, sharp cinematography; digitally juiced sound that you feel in your bones; taut performances; and a driving script that keeps the tension rising in a steady upward arc.

More importantly, the film has several factors at work that serve to tamp down the “Cruiseness” of its star.

For one thing, Cruise is surrounded by heavyweight actors, among them Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Terence Stamp.

For another, Stauffenberg loses an eye and a hand early in the film during an allied bombing raid in North Africa. Putting an eyepatch on Cruise proves effective in diminishing that famous profile and allowing him to be more believable in his role.

And the fact that the most vilified monster in human history is propelling the story doesn’t exactly hurt, either.

One of the film’s guiltier pleasures is watching how Singer gets the actors to subtly react like the temperature drops about 10 degrees anytime Hitler (British actor David Bamber, Cicero on HBO’s “Rome”) is in the frame.

The film stays true to the record. Stauffenberg, who came from Catholic aristocracy, was not a Hitler fan; he never became a party member and found the ideology ridiculous.

As the film relates, he was already disillusioned about the war effort as early as 1943, when that North African allied bombing raid cost him his hand and eye. Convinced that Hitler was on a path to destroying his beloved Fatherland, Stauffenberg cast his lot with a group of conspirators led by Gen. Friedrich Olbricht (Nighy).

That plan was to blow up a time-delayed bomb inside a briefcase within the windowless, underground bunker in which the target meeting was to take place. But in the heat of summer, a decision was made to move to an above-ground cottage, whose windows dissipated the blast and allowed Hitler to live another 10 months before he committed suicide.

Back in Berlin, the conspiracy cabal goes weak in the knees at the moment of truth. Without reliable assurance that Hitler was dead, Olbricht refused to give the critical order to deploy the home guard for the decapitation of the hardcore SS fanatics and the senior Nazi leadership remaining in Berlin.

When the SS realized what had almost happened, they easily rounded up the principals and summarily executed them, Stauffenberg included. And so ended the “July 20 Plot,” the last of more than a dozen known assassination attempts on Hitler.

You already know how the whole thing ends, but “Valkyrie” still rises to the level of a must-see for all armchair World War II historians because it raises the irresistibly tantalizing question: What if …?

(Source: ArmyTimes)