Valkyrie

Directed by Bryan Singer. Starring Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Eddie Izzard, Terence Stamp, Carice van Houten, Thomas Kretschmann, Christian Berkel 12A cert, gen release, 121 min

DONALD CLARKE

BRYAN SINGER’S treatment of the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler has been shuffled round the schedules more often than that god-awful Guns n’ Roses album. As a result, suspicions have grown that the film may stink like unwashed lederhosen (or Chinese Democracy ). Yet, oddly, the rumours suggest that the film has just one big problem: it’s got Tom Cruise in it , writes DONALD CLARKE .

What an odd irony. By signing up to play Count Claus von Stauffenberg, the officer who led the plot, Cruise ensured that this costly film got made, but the faint hint of camp that hangs around the star jeopardised its successful release.

As it happens, Valkyrie turns out to be a pretty decent piece of work. Featuring a classy line-up of older British actors (and the reliably useless Eddie Izzard), Singer’s picture is brave in its reluctance to simplify or to sentimentalise. Viewers without specialist knowledge will need to play close attention as the complex plot spins its way to its inevitable failure.

In the summer of 1944, as German forces retreated on two fronts, a group of officers, most of whom had long harboured a distaste for the Nazis, redrafted certain emergency legislation to allow them to seize Berlin in the event of the Führer’s death. Von Stauffenberg was dispatched to place a briefcase containing explosives beneath Hitler’s map table.

Synger, director of The Usual Suspects and X-Men , does a good job of summoning up the paranoia and disquiet that spread about Berlin in those poisonous months. Some observers may feel uneasy at the representation of Nazi officers as heroes, however reluctant, of the resistance, but Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp and the rest of the mob have enough charisma to distract from those concerns (at least until the credits roll).

If one does, at times, feel like one is watching the dramatised sections from a BBC documentary, then that is, perhaps, a tribute to the seriousness with which Synger has approached his task.

There’s just one problem: it’s got Tom Cruise in it . It’s not that Tom is particularly badly miscast (the accent is distracting, but he does look quite like Von Stauffenberg) or that he delivers a poor performance (he keeps a straight face and wears an eye-patch with confidence). It’s just that so much creepy, squeaky, fanatical, crackpot baggage follows the Cruiser around that it is near impossible to think of him as anything other than a deranged sofa-bouncer.

Yes, that’s right: Tom Cruise seems too weird to play a Nazi successfully. Now, that should give him pause for thought.