Review of Valkyrie (2008) by Landf — 21 Apr 2012

Adolf Hitler committed suicide April 30, 1945. Valkyrie is about a group of men who are plotting to assassinate Hitler. Due to the information I have just given to you, you now know that by the end of the movie, Hitler will still be alive.

This is a bit of a problem for Valkyrie, but this film does a relatively good job of making you forget about this conclusion. The A-list cast does a more-than-excellent job at acting, though the actual character development is extremely minimal for most characters.

Valkyrie does something very smart at the beginning of the movie. We understand that the characters are all speaking German, but they speak English anyway. This eliminates the need for silly German accents, and is much less distracting.

There are times when this is contradicted though, such as one scene where there is a woman singing in German, but these are forgivable. Unfortunately, my compliments must end here. Valkyrie is not an action movie.

It is not placed under the action genre, and there are almost not action scenes in the movie. Valkyrie is a war movie. Does this seem contradictory to you? I was surprised by the lack of action in Valkyrie, but a lack of action isn't necessarily a bad thing if the movie is entertaining enough.

Unfortunately, Valkyrie is mostly just people talking and planning. The reward for waiting through all the talking? One explosion. Really, that's all. For all the planning and talking and such, I expected a very elaborate plan to take place.

The plan, though, is really not much more then setting a bomb next to Hitler during a meeting. So I ask, how did a film with such a simple plot manage to stretch to a unnecessarily long, 2 hours? It seems that more time was spent thinking of one liners, than developing an interesting plot.

What was most agonizing though, was all the potential Valkyrie. Imagine if we were given flashbacks to Hitler's childhood. And what if there was some more background about the main character's marriage? More story, a little more action, and some decent character development would've gone a long way for turning this mostly mediocre film into the masterpiece it just missed out on.