MGC banner

Come to the Midwest Gaming Classic 2010

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Video Review series: Valkyrie

Over the weekend, I had a chance to finally sit down and watch Valkyrie. This is Tom Cruise's latest flick, and to be honest, I'm hoping his last... His acting abilities have really gone down hill.

Valkyrie is based on a true story. During World War II, there were many attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Some of them were from rival forces, but many were orchestrated by his own countrymen. You see, even people deep within the Reich believed Hitler was insane, and worked hard to remove him from power. Unfortunately, all attempts failed.

Valkyrie was the final attempt, organized by high-ranking officials from within the Reich, as well as defectors from Hitler's Germany. The story itself is fascinating, and there are some good History Channel documentaries available on it.

Back to the movie, it is most certainly what I would classify as a "Netflix Only" title. This means, I wouldn't even waste the money to rent it from a video store. If you have Netflix, and you are very bored, throw it on the queue.

I viewed the movie on Blu-Ray, on our 62" HDTV. It's a visually beautiful movie, and it was kept very period-specific in detail. I was impressed with the time taken to do so, as many movies really phone-in the fine details.

That is where my enjoyment in the movie ended. This film was plagued with problems, and the story flow I felt was terrible. I had no interest in the characters due to lack of proper development, nore did I feel that the story was conveyed in any kind of organized fashion. In fact, I had to watch the documentaries just to figure out what happened.

The next major flaw, and probably the worst, were the very poor attempts at German accents. What it led to were a bunch of people walking around sounding like drunk Englishman. Seriously, I kept waiting for Hitler to ask for tea and crumpets! It would have been much better had the actors used their natural accents, and just focused on story progression.

So, the basic opinion is this movie lacked organization, good acting, and story. It had such potential, and it flopped hardcore.

No comments:

Post a Comment