Valkyrie

There are no discernibly nasty Nazis in “Valkyrie,” though Hitler and Goebbels skulk about in a few scenes, shooting dark, ominous looks at the heroic German Army officer played by Tom Cruise.

Perhaps they’re wondering what this Hollywood megastar is doing in their midst, a sentiment that you may come to share while watching Mr. Cruise — who gives a fine, typically energetic performance in a film that requires nothing more of him than a profile and vigor — strut about as one of history’s more enigmatic players. That enigma was Claus von Stauffenberg, a count and a colonel who, though he lost one eye, an entire hand and several fingers while fighting on behalf of the Reich, made several attempts to assassinate Hitler and seize control of the government.

At the core of Stauffenberg’s spectacularly ambitious plot was Valkyrie, Hitler’s plan for the mobilization of the home army that Stauffenberg hoped to hijack in order to quash the SS and its leaders. It didn’t work, of course, for complicated reasons, though also because by 1944, as William L. Shirer bluntly puts it in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” the conspirators were “terribly late.” Most of the crucial rebellious officers are played by British actors, while some of the Nazi diehards are played by Germans, which wouldn’t be worth mentioning if this cacophony of accents weren’t so distracting. But, as with the casting of Mr. Cruise, whose German voice-over quickly eases into English, this international acting community invokes an earlier studio age, when Peter Lorre and Claude Rains delivered their lines in exotically flavored English and everyone pretended that Rick’s Cafe really was located in Casablanca and not on a back lot.

If Mr. Cruise doesn’t work in “Valkyrie,” it’s partly because he’s too modern, too American and way too Tom Cruise to make sense in the role, but also because what passes for movie realism keeps changing, sometimes faster than even a star can change his brand. Though Mr. Singer’s old-fashioned movie habits, his attention to the gloss, gleam and glamour of the image, can be agreeably pleasurable, he tends to gild every lily. Hitler (David Bamber) doesn’t need spooky music or low camera angles to be villainous: he just has to show up. Mr. Singer’s fondness for exaggeration can even undercut his strongest scenes, as when Stauffenberg visits Hitler to secure approval for the rewritten Valkyrie plan. If implemented, the plan will bring down the Führer who, for his part, seems intent on bringing down the house with leers and popping eyeballs. Mr. Singer appears to have taken cues here from “Black Book,” Paul Verhoeven’s World War II romp, but he’s too serious to make such vaudeville work.