CinemaSerf

Tom Cruise sports an eye-patch as he takes on the role of Nazi war hero Claus von Stauffenberg. Badly injured he returns to Germany where he is quickly appointed to staff rank with regular access to an appreciative Führer (David Bamber). His arrival co-insides with the increasingly stark realisation from many politicians and officers alike that their hopes of winning the war were dwindling and that something is going to have to be done about removing their neurotic Chancellor and instituting a new national order that might be able to negotiate some sort of peace. Of course, some of the High Command were still fiercely loyal so it was a bit of an eggshell treading operation for von Stauffenberg and his allies as they are not sure whom to trust whilst they put a daring plan into action that could result in a coup treasonable in anyone's book if they fail. Relying on a fair-to-middling selection of mainly British actors, Bryan Singer does ok with his star here, but the film does really lack jeopardy as it rather trundles out of the traps and gurgles it's way along before finally enlivening for the last twenty minutes or so. Cruise's legendary charisma deserts him here and frankly, he hasn't really the gravitas to carry this off convincingly - and that goes for Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and (fleetingly) Kenneth Branagh too as this whole production struggles to really capture the complexities and dangers faced by these conspirators - the braver ones and the skin-savers. The actual intricacies of their "Valkyrie" operation itself are superficially glossed over and, given we all know what really happened, the film offers us little compelling to get our teeth into. Disappointing, I'd say. Sorry.

I must admit I didn't quite understand just what was going on at the start of this. "Lee Kang-su" (Kang Ha-neul) is a brash and confident young man who manages to get information on drug dealers which he then passes on to the police and/or the public prosecutors in return for a cut and them getting a reduced sentence if they turn state's evidence. Thing is, the further up the food chain they get the more political "interference" the investigators encounter and pretty swiftly that causes problems for this young "Yadang" as he ends up a victim of his erstwhile protector, ambitious prosecutor "Ku Gwen-hee" (Yoo Hae-jin) and pumped full of blue methadone to the point where he doesn't know day from night. Once released, though, he unites with similarly manipulated former police captain "Oh Sang-jae" (Park Hae-joon) and an young actor (Chae Won-bin) whose career was wrecked after she, too, was exposed to this highly addictive substance and ultimately used as a glorified hooker by someone extremely close to the presidency - and the election is looming. Once the story gets up and running, this proves to be quite an entertaining, if not always entirely plausible, analysis of lucrative drug running and politicking in a South Korea that seems determined to stamp out criminality however perilous that path might be. It's a gritty, sometimes seedy film that sees both men and Chae Win-bin deliver strongly and in the case of Kang Hae-neul enthusiastically too. There is plenty of action across the two hours and the denouement has something of "The Sting" (1973) to it as vengeance knows few bounds. Worth a watch.

You could always count on Ron Goodwin to come up with a lively score for a wartime movie, and he does so well here with this "Guns of Navarone" spin-off. It keeps the "Mallory" (Robert Shaw) and "Miller" (Edward Fox) roles and introduces them to American colonel "Barnsby" (Harrison Ford) as they hijack a Lancaster bomber and end up in Yugoslavia where the partisan army is fighting the encroaching Nazi war machine. The former two are up for tracking down a fifth columnist called "Nikolai" who had caused them considerable grief in Greece earlier in the war. The Colonel is to try and help the locals - led by "Petrovich" (Alan Badel) to stop the advancing army, and that means holding a vital bridge. Of course, when they arrive they have to find their potential allies, and with nobody quite sure who to trust, and the menacing "Drazak" (Richard Kiel without shiny teeth) on their trail, it's dangerous stuff. A combination of fairly easy clues let us know who the baddie is, but as the adventure heads to it's quite exciting denouement, there are loads of escapades for our ever diminishing squad as they set about their tasks. Ford and Shaw work well together, Fox and Franco Nero also do just about enough and the whole thing rollicks along nicely for just shy of a two hours that also introduces us to some earthily disguised WWII explosive devices. It was probably made just a decade too late to really resonate as a film about the atrocities of war, but as an action adventure film from a lesser-known theatre of the war, it's quite an enjoyable watch that passes the time without stretching your grey cells too much.