How do you make a thriller work when the ending is common knowledge? That’s the conundrum facing Tom Cruise, Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie when they gathered to make Valkyrie, a World War II flick that told the story of the last of 15 attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler by various German conspiracies. Obviously, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of history will know the outcome of the story as the filmmakers weren’t given the same vast historical leeway Quentin Tarantino gave himself when making Inglorious Basterds, so the creative team behind The Usual Suspects obviously had their work cut out for them when it came to sustaining tension for a mission we already know went kaput.
I suppose we could class it as an impossible mission (ironic because of the union Cruise and McQuarrie would later forge thanks to the continuing adventures of Ethan Hunt), but if anyone could draw tension out of a foregone conclusion, it’s these guys, right?
Growing steadily disillusioned with the war, Wehrmacht Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (exhale) finds his patience with Germany’s ruler wearing extraordinarily thin after he’s seriously wounded in an air raid in Tunisia. Returning home to his family missing an eye, a hand and a couple of fingers, Stauffenberg is approached by General Friedrich Olbricht to fill up a recently vacated spot in the German Resistance who are dead set on removing Hitler from power before the Allied forces move throughout Europe.
Nerves are frayed as a previous attempt to place a bomb next to the Fuhrer amounted to naught, but Stauffenberg agrees that killing Hitler is only part of the solution and that an established plan using the reserve army named Operation Valkyrie be repurposed to be deployed in the event of Hitler’s death in order to neutralise the SS under the guise of an attempted coup. If getting all this lined up isn’t daunting enough, Stauffenberg also has to ensure that his fellow conspirators hold their nerve as certain members are tougher to bring around than others.
There’s also the factor of those who know of the plan, but won’t fully commit until they know which side is going to win out, such as the duplicitous, flip-flopping General Fromm, but soon it comes time for Stauffenberg and his colleagues to sheiße or get off the pot and go all in at taking out the leader of the Third Reich. However, as the pressure builds, the cogs start turning and the plan gets into motion, misinformation starts to seep into the gears to make the result completely up in the air. There’s nothing less that the fate of the free world at stake, but things are even more personal for Stauffenberg as he has a wife and children in the wind – but the real tragedy is that we already know how his mission turned out.
Trying to eek out tension from a real-life event that comes with a widely known conclusion isn’t easy, but it’s certainly not impossible as the hour-long sinking of James Cameron’s Titanic will attest. However, while that movie, and others like it, put fictional characters (read: potentially expendable) front and centre of well publicised historical happenings, Valkyrie can’t even hide behind that trope as a quick look on Wikipedia will probably reveal that these were real people. That means the entire movie hinges on the likes of Singer, McQuarrie and Cruise having to go all out to make us believe that we can’t predict what’s blatantly going to happen – but while these guys truly give it the old college try, the main problem behind the film is it’s nigh impossible for a thriller to thrill if you know how everything eventually turns out. The frustrating thing is that if anyone was going to make it work, it was this trio of filmmakers; but there’s still good stuff here to mine.
Singer certainly has his issues in the real world, but as a filmmaker he’s proved himself mainly by managing to turn McQuarrie’s absurdly twisty script for The Usual Suspects into one of the best of the 90s many crime films and help build Marvel into the cinematic juggernaut it became by realising the X-Men in fleshy, three dimensions. Similarly, McQuarrie’s track record post-Valkyrie proves that he’s a guy who knows how to visualise complex ensembles embarking on missions with slim chances of success. And then there’s Cruise who, before almost fully dedicating himself to an endless array of extravagant stunts, was the go-to guy to deliver clench-jawed performances marked consistently by exuding drawn out tension like an unbelievably tense aromatherapy diffuser. To further aid them, Valkyrie sees the cast list literally crammed to the breaking point with every British character actor you can name that includes Bill Nighy, Eddie Izzard, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp, Kevin McNally, Kenneth Cranham and Tom Hollander showing up in German uniforms to click their heels together and nervously discuss their desperate plan.
However, while everything seems on side to counteract the rather obvious ending, Valkyrie just can’t quite get past it, and in an odd turn, feels weirdly workman like for a director obsessed with detail such as Singer. For a start, while the matter of accurate accents has never bothered me much, the fact that all the German officers use a range of dialects (mostly clipped English) is weirdly off putting. Cruise obviously tackles the role in utilising a defiant American tone possibly because he’s still feeling burned from attempting Irish back in Far And Away and the majority of the rest of the cast also use their normal voices, but then you have Thomas Kretschmann and Christian Berkel show up with their natural German accents and it just becomes too weirdly distracting. Another issue is despite we’re being asked to follow these men on their dangerous quest, Singer doesn’t really ensure that we give much of a shit about them beyond their mission. Despite the token love for his wife and children, there’s no feeling for Stauffenberg as a man beyond the fact that he’s being played by Tom Cruise and thus does very Tom Cruise things, which leads to a strange, low-stakes sort of feeling.
However, whenever Singer is actually allowed to break free of endless exposition and deliver some sweat inducing set pieces, Valkyrie suddenly springs to life. Be it a various kerfuffle involving a satchel with an explosive inside accidently blending in with numerous identical bags, the sight of Stauffenberg frantically trying to race to get where he needs to be while remaining outwardly calm, or a moment where Cruise deliberately delivers his only “Heil Hitler” with his missing hand, there are numerous times when Valkyrie looks to be succeeding in its mission. But considering that the entire film should be having you drenched in nervous perspiration, Singer and Co. can’t stop this from being as hit and miss as those 15 other assassination attempts.
A Fuhrer good men can’t stop this wartime thriller from being unable to circumvent it’s obvious ending, and while it gives Cruise and a clutch of British character actors ample chance to look stressed while clad in German military refinery, Valkyrie ends up being mostly forgettable – even when the shit Hitlers the fan…
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