From left to right: Kevin McNally, Christian Berkel, Bill Nighy, Tom Cruise, Terence Stamp, David Schofield and Kenneth Brannagh

Lately, I'm getting a whiff of corpse rot from Valkyrie, the Tom Cruise verses Adolf Hitler pic. Since bad buzz has been shooting down the pike regularly on Valkyrie, RopeofSilicon decided to get its paws on the January 9, 2007, version of the script written by Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander to see if any hope exists.

Nothing has swung in Valkyrie's favor since its announcement. The filmmakers battled the German government to shoot on Bender Block because Cruise's Scientology beliefs are the one thing that gives the Germans the heebie-jeebies. Several extras took a hurting when they fell off a moving truck. Some chemical mishap ruined the negative for several scenes and forced reshoots. Then there's the hopscotch of release dates. First a blockbuster summer slot. Then a more Oscar-bating fall date. And now the dumping ground of February 2009 because the studio wants to capture the powerhouse President's Day weekend crowd—an excuse that begged for snarky retorts from us movie news scribblers and secured the film's reputation as troubled.

However, maybe February is best for Valkyrie. If the final product resembles this draft, then the movie is too talky for the summer popcorn days yet too superficial to capture any awards bling (although that didn't stop Crash). The screenplay is a failed Oscar-baiter containing stage directions of smug, pretentious, meta-commentary that often comes across as the writers masturbating to their own work. The dialogue tosses out platitudes like someone chop-shopped the screenplay for Lions for Lambs. It reads like the type of movie that would win awards within a movie parodying Hollywood—think the movie in the movie from The Player, In & Out or even the upcoming Tropic Thunder.

From left to right:Colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg … Tom Cruise

Yet, with all that said, the film has the workings of a decent but not profound World War II thriller. It's like Mission: Impossible, but with Nazis and tells the true story (and actually stays remarkably close to history according to my Wikipedia research) of Colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg (Cruise minus one eyeball, one hand, and two fingers on his remaining meathook, that's him just above) who led a group of German officers in an attempted government coup and assassination of Hitler. Suffice to say, it didn't work out.

Stauffenberg and several of his co-conspirators may have been German soldiers but were not members of the National Socialist party and abhorred Hitler's politics and genocidal policies—a point the screenplay hammers in. They hatched a plan that included blowing up Hitler real good and manipulating the reserve army to seize control of the government. The screenplay contains several standard thriller bits of bombs in bags and close calls with villains almost discovering the bombs, giving suspicious looks that end up meaning nothing, and characters saying something along the lines of "do you think he knows?" Cliches? Sure. But it could be fun if done right by Singer.

Yet, if McQuarrie and Alexander were aiming for some level of prestige, they should have dialed down the thriller elements and focused on making the script a real character piece by delving deeper than platitudes on why these men risked all. We know the plot doesn't succeed, so why waste our time in trying to persuade us it will other than for empty amusement? It would have also served the screenplay well if the characters of Hitler, Albert Speer, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Herman Goering and the other "bad" Nazis weren't caricatures (as the screenplay actually describes them at one point) that just walked out of an Indiana Jones movie. If the brilliant German film Downfall demonstrated anything, it proved that Hitler and his minions are much scarier when depicted as real humans.

So come February, assuming that date sticks, the best I hope for is an entertaining thriller. If Singer pulls off something better than that, it'll come as truly blindsiding.

EXTRA READING: Kim Masters at Slate Offers Up More Release Date Theories

Related post categories: Features : Script Reviews, Valkyrie

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