Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) organizes an attempt to kill Hitler and put an end to the Second World War in the thriller Valkyrie. (Frank Connor/MGM Pictures)

The real cliffhanger in the Second World War drama Valkyrie isn’t whether Tom Cruise’s eye-patch-wearing German officer will bump off Adolf Hitler — we all know how that turns out. It’s whether the troubled film will save Cruise’s company, United Artists, and revive his flagging career. We won’t find out the answer until they count the box office receipts, but the movie deserves to do well. While it isn’t exactly Oscar material, Valkyrie is a solid historical thriller that succeeds in generating suspense over the outcome of a famous failed assassination plot.

Valkyrie is a solid historical thriller that succeeds in generating suspense over the outcome of the failed assassination of Hitler.

Cruise stars as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the German army chief of staff who organized a daring attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944 and put an end to the Second World War. The film opens in Tunisia in 1943, where Stauffenberg is serving with Germany’s Afrikakorps while seething with disgust at the barbaric acts committed in the name of Nazism. After an air attack leaves him without his right hand, left eye and two left fingers, the recuperating Stauffenberg comes in contact with a conspiracy of like-minded officers and politicians who have been secretly plotting to bring down the Third Reich.

Re-assigned as chief of staff for the army’s reserve forces under fellow Resistance member Gen. Friedrich Olbricht (Bill Nighy), Stauffenberg finds a perfect means of launching a coup d’état: Operation Valkyrie, a provision named after one of Hitler’s favourite Wagner operas, which permits the reserve army to take control in the event of an emergency. Stauffenberg makes some cunning revisions to the plan, which will allow him and his co-conspirators to oust the hated SS, Hitler’s elite Nazi force, after the dictator is assassinated.

Director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, the team that gave us The Usual Suspects, once again prove their facility with intricately plotted thrillers. The story stays tightly focused on the conspiracy and its key players. There are only a few scenes with Stauffenberg’s loving wife, Nina (Dutch actress Carice van Hauten), and their adorable brood of blond children, who are on screen just long enough to establish the personal risk the colonel is taking by betraying the Reich.

In the same reductive spirit, Cruise gives an intense, pared-down portrayal of Stauffenberg. He doesn’t attempt a German accent — probably a wise move for an actor not known as a vocal chameleon — but he does take artful advantage of his character’s disability. There’s a nerve-jangling scene in which Stauffenberg tries to prepare a delicate attaché-case bomb with his three-fingered hand. (And, in a touch of black humour, he finds a novel use for his glass eye.) It helps that, with a wave in his hair, Cruise bears a passing resemblance to the real Stauffenberg. Maybe the best compliment you can pay his performance is that you quickly forget this is a Tom Cruise Movie.

From left, Carl Goerdeler (Kevin McNally), Albrecht Riter Merz von Quirnheim (Christian Berkel), General Friedrich Olbricht (Bill Nighy), Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise), General Ludwig Beck (Terence Stamp), Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben (David Schofield) and Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh) collaborate to try and take down Hitler in Valkyrie. (Frank Connor/MGM Pictures)

In reality, it’s an ensemble piece, with a first-rate team recruited from the British acting ranks: Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp, Eddie Izzard. Perhaps out of solidarity with Cruise, they also stick to their native accents. (The lone exception is David Bamber, as a low-key but credible Hitler.) A beefy Branagh, looking suitably Teutonic, is Maj.-Gen. Henning von Tresckow, who introduces Stauffenberg to the Resistance. (He also makes his own attempt on Hitler’s life with an explosives-packed Cointreau bottle.) Wilkinson, who played the renegade lawyer in Michael Clayton, is once again superb as Fromm, the imperious general with the authority to launch Valkyrie. Nighy is especially memorable as the mild-mannered, bespectacled Olbricht, who projects a kind of grandfatherly decency that is nicely at odds with the usual German military clichés.

Director Singer and his editor, John Ottman (who also cut The Usual Suspects), build the tension by degrees. What at first seems a slow, talky drama slowly reshapes itself into a terse action film. By the time Stauffenberg finally explodes his bomb during a conference in the “Wolf’s Lair” — Hitler’s Eastern Front headquarters — we’ve become so engrossed in the story that we’re willing to temporarily forget its foregone conclusion. There follows a feverish interlude — the most striking part of the movie — where Stauffenberg and his aides, believing the Fuhrer has died, swiftly begin putting their coup into effect. It’s a breathtaking interval in which you find yourself hoping that somehow they’ll pull it off, history be damned.

As a re-examination of the Nazi era, Valkyrie isn’t quite in the same league as recent European films like Downfall (2005), this year’s Oscar-winning The Counterfeiters and the soon-to-be-released Danish Resistance epic Flame & Citron. However, Valkyrie does illuminate a sometimes forgotten aspect of wartime Germany — that there was dissent and resistance even within the nation’s top ranks.

Stauffenberg and his collaborators bring a different meaning to author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s infamous phrase, “Hitler’s willing executioners.” It’s reassuring to know there were some high-placed men willing to kill their leader rather than carry forward his horrific master plan. The number of lives that might have been spared had they succeeded, however, is too heartbreaking to contemplate.

Valkyrie opens Dec. 25.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.