Bryan Singer recounts the last and most nearly successful of the fifteen known plots to assassinate Hitler, not counting the fictitious one in Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt, from the Geoffrey Household novel, Rogue Male. We know beforehand that the plot must fail, despite having Tom Cruise on board as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg. (Were you hoping he’d be playing Hitler?) What went wrong, when, why, and how, can nonetheless drum up sufficient curiosity and suspense. Rooting interest is another matter, held in check not simply by hopelessness but by dimming Star Power. Cruise, who no longer can get by on his smile, starts out speaking English-subtitled German in voice-over, just to establish his Teutonic credentials, and then switches for the duration to his normal American-accented English, standing out from the British-accented English of his co-conspirators, Kenneth Branagh, Terence Stamp, Bill Nighy (wonderfully transformed through slicked-back hair and grandfatherish eyeglasses), Eddie Izzard, and, an unreliable fence-sitter in the conspiracy, Tom Wilkinson, to say nothing of the German-accented English of the really, really bad Nazis, Hitler and Goebbels. But that’s not the only way Cruise seems not to belong. Even with eyepatch and digitalized arm stump, he comes across as something of a lightweight, no matter how hard he glares with his one operative eye: roughly as hard as a puerile comic-book addict who believes he can develop X-ray vision if only he practices. It’s a distraction, as the plan falls apart, to be thinking to ourselves that the bomb ought to have been entrusted to an Englishman. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd