No one wanted to see Valkyrie. Poor Tom Cruise, I think his day has passed.
While the film opened with mixed reviews, it came in a surprising 4th place for Christmas weekend box office sales...a very good showing. And Tom Cruise, imo, remains huge box office and has much more left in his stellar career.
I thought
Valkyrie was quite good. It was well paced, extremely intense and nerve-racking; in spite of my having read two bios on von Stauffenberg and knew the story quite well, the director had me on edge the full 2 hours.
Casting was overall superb. Cruise looked strikingly similar to von Stauffenberg, and his performance was a B+, imo; he came across very well. His stiffness was completely in character with von Stauffenberg.
Unlike most 'historical' films, it did not suffer the typical Hollywoodization by signifcantly altering historical fact, which was a pleasure. There was some obvious scripting that had to have been infused by the writers' imaginations, but overall, the history was solid.
The two areas that could have been better were the portrayal of Hitler as a munchin like creature, silent and brooding, slow and seemingly 'not all there'. This was inaccurate; while it did not majorly distract from the core film, it would have been better, imo, to portray Hitler as the strong and powerful and intense persona he was, and his being assassinated would have seemed all the more intriguing.
The other part that was under represented was the executions at the end. Hitler and his gang brutally murdered the conspirators and the killings were bloody, torturous and horrendous scenes of mayhem which did not get shown.