I was stuck with an evening to kill in town with my cinema pass in my hand and so I chose to see a couple of films. I’lll be going to see ‘Frost/Nixon’ and ‘Milk’ with my wife and have seen a few of the others currently showing and so that- and the screening times- left me with a double bill of ‘Valkyrie’ and ‘The Reader’. With ‘Valkyrie’ up first.
So, this is the Tom Cruise lining himself with proper actors like Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp and Kenneth Branagh in a bid to showcase his talent. He plays a German Officer with an American accent who loses an eye and one and a half of his hands in the first scene of the movie. Now, as Tom is a severely limited actor whose entire range consists of either flashing a handsome toothy grin or shaking his fist beside his head and shouting, these particular impairments are severe indeed. It's akin to Frank Bruno stepping in the ring with Lennox Lewis again- only this time wearing handcuffs. And, so it turns out as you would expect. I'll explain- Terence Stamp acts Tom Cruise off the screen in this movie and do you know how? He doesn't change his expression at any point and reads his lines solemnly. This is Terry Stamp doing an advert for that life insurance that only the over-50s can have and still he makes Tom Cruise look like a kid in a nativity play. Pitiful, Tom. Give it up and make action movies with car chases like you're supposed to. Or just give it up.
I mentioned earlier that Tom keeps his own accent through the course of the movie and it is fucking pathetic. It isn't acting if you just stand in front of a camera being yourself, you nob! I'm not asking him to do anything strenuous in the way of research like watching 'Das Boot' all the way through, just to swap the odd double-u for a vee and pronounce your th sounds as a zed. Show willing at least. Everyone in the film keeps their own accents by the way- presumably not to show Tom up- which means that you get the broad Scouse of Yosser Hughes conversing with New Yorker Tom as fellow countrymen in the opening scene. It doesn't set the film up well, I'll put it that way. I know that Sean Connery won an Oscar playing an Irish-American Chicago policeman with an Edinburgh burr, but that was a one off surely. I love Connery dearly (incidentally, I saw him interviewed recently and he looks like shit I hope he's okay) but to win for that and not, say, 'Goldfinger' or 'The Man Who Would Be King' must baffle even him. Anyway, I digress. So, everyone keeps their accent and it's fine- until Thomas Kretschmann and Christian Berkel appear. They are German, you see- and everyone is then shown up all over again.
I'm going to digress again now. Mentioning Thomas Kretschmann reminds me, he went straight from filming 'SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2' (which I've seen, to my lasting shame) to filming 'Downfall / Der Untergang'. Has anyone else ever gone quite so blatantly from the ridiculous to the sublime I wonder? This is the kind of thing I found myself thinking during 'Valkyrie'- the thought that occupied me for longest, though, was 'was 'The Usual Suspects' Bryan Singer's version of Deee-Lite's 'Groove Is In The Heart', a brilliant zeitgest-riding fluke?
Of course, this being a Tom Cruise movie it has a huge budget- lots of sweeping helicopter shots, well-paid cameos and CGI which, in truth, do nothing to improve the viewing experience. It is supposed to look expensive and it does. It's still shit, though. 1/10.
