Awesome/Stupid/Pointless: Valkyrie (2008)

Awesome:

  • Yay! Real WWII airplanes! No CGI cartoons flying around (I think there may have been couple cartoons, but most planes were real).
  • Very hard to fuck up costumes when you’re dealing with Nazis. Those guys had “malevolent chic” down like noboby’s business.
  • Kenneth Branagh blows his own head off with a hand grenade.

Stupid:

  • It’s become near-impossible to watch movies with Hitler without thinking about the damn “Downfall” internet meme. Whenever Hitler was mumbling, I thought he was complaining about his World of Warcraft account.

Pointless:

  • The movie starts with Tom Cruise writing in his diary how awful Hitler is and how he must be stopped. The rest of the running time is a competently-paced thriller about trying to kill Hitler. Which EVERYONE ON PLANET EARTH knows they didn’t pull off. The interesting part of this story is how and when German soldiers decided their supreme commander had to be killed in order to save Germany, not the procedural television episode of how they tried to do it.

Final Word:

Bryan Singer can’t seem to make good movies with Nazis in them unless there are super-powered mutants as well. (IMDb)

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