‘Valkyrie’ lacks the Reich stuff

It is admittedly difficult, although not altogether impossible, to make a movie about a historical event where everyone already knows the ending. Still, “All the President’s Men” and “Apollo 13” both generate substantial suspense even though almost everyone who saw either film had a pretty good idea of the outcome.

Telling that kind of story when things end up less happily is even trickier, but still doable: The second half of Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” for example, follows Dr. Guevara to a rather dismal end in Bolivia, but the mechanics of his failure remain compelling.

And then there’s “Valkyrie,” which Mark Twain might have subtitled “The Not-So-Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” Director Bryan Singer is a master of forward motion in his storytelling — I still think “X2” is one of the best superhero films ever made — but he never distracts us enough from the knowledge that doom is around the corner for our heroes, a cadre of Nazis who sought to kill Hitler and negotiate with the Allied forces in the waning days of World War II.

After losing an eye, a hand and several fingers in North Africa, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) is recruited to join the high-level resistance by General Friedrich Olbricht (Bill Nighy). Von Stauffenberg devises a plan in which Operation Valkyrie — which was designed to keep the peace in the event that Hitler (David Bamber) should die — gets rewritten to allow Olbricht and his comrades to take power and to authorize the arrest of the entire SS, so that the Gestapo won’t be a factor in the regime change.

Getting Hitler to sign these new orders unread proves rather easy, but killing the Führer presents more of a challenge. At a meeting at Hitler’s Wolf’s Den bunker, however, von Stauffenberg is able to plant an explosive device, which successfully explodes....