It seems United Artists has a lot on the line as far as convincing audiences with Tom Cruise’s eye patch role in ‘Valkyrie’. As I have said a million times, this film has had so many problems and things are not getting any better.
Early reviews of Tom’s performance are saying that his role is getting uncomfortable and inappropriate laughs. Here’s an example from MSNBC:
Among them: A scene where Cruise’s character, Claus Von Stauffenberg, is forced to give the infamous “Heil Hitler” salute. “It’s an unsettling scene but you almost start to laugh,” the source says. “His character is resisting it but you never forget it’s Tom Cruise saying ‘Heil Hitler.’ It’s funny and shocking at the same time.”
Yikes, that is really unfortunate.
One film-goer said that the movie is not anywhere near the thriller that it’s been described as. Instead, he says it’s “a bunch of white guys in Nazi uniforms. It’s too bad. And Tom doesn’t speak with a German accent — though they did add a voiceover of him speaking German to the beginning of the film. Still, it’s as if he could say ‘I complete you’ at any time. This is not his Oscar moment.”
Instead of a thriller, Valkyrie has been labeled as the ‘eye patch Tom Cruise movie’. There were several changes made to the movie when a new marketing chief, Michael Vollman, was brought on. The first thing he did was move the released date back to December 26th. Another change included the genre. They have tried to label it as a thriller and not a war movie. I don’t think it worked.
There were also new campaigns released and a lot of market research done. The research revealed that Tom Cruise is still very much a big movie star and that audiences liked seeing him lead a group of people and solve a problem.
This Valkyrie story is getting more and more interesting by the minute. I look forward to hearing more reviews as more audiences screen test the film.
Image Credit: Newscom
