TOM CRUISE'S NEXT MISSION IS TO KICK HITLER'S BUTT

VALKYRIE: Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Patrick Wilson, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Fry (Directed by Bryan Singer; Written by Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander; MGM/United Artists)

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (shown at left) was the passionately Catholic, marginally crazed Nazi who huddled, somewhat tardily, with his fellow officers and hatched a plan to bump off Adolf Hitler toward the wind-down of World War II. Not only was he motivated by his deepening hatred of Hitler, but he was totally turned off by the war itself, having lost his left eye in a 1943 aerial strafing, plus his right hand and 2 fingers of his left hand on the same occasion. But that was nothing compared to what happened in July, 1944, when he planted a bomb under Hitler’s conference room table. Some people were killed in the ensuing explosion, but nowhere among them was Der Fuhrer. And that’s how poor Von Stauffenberg came to face a Berlin firing squad later that month.

The question now is, who could possibly play the role of this unpredictable, tricky, high-energy wannabe hero? And the answer, of course, is that incomparably unpredictable, tricky, high-energy superstar Tom Cruise. Adding to the promise of unpredictability and trickery is the fact that the director and the screenwriter of the film, former New Jersey high school classmates Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie, are the guys who fooled us so masterfully in 1995’s “The Usual Suspects.”

Opening date to be announced

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