Beyond Valkyrie: Dawn of the Fourth Reich (2016)

So the story is entirely fictional. Well, not entirely, I suppose. There really was an Operation Valkyrie - a failed attempt by the military to assassinate Hitler in the weeks after D-Day. Beyond that, this is pretty much fictional. The plot has a number of high-ranking Nazi officials along with a German Catholic Bishop planning to make off with a huge amount of gold bullion, escape in a submarine to Argentina and, with this war lost, try to establish the Fourth Reich. Yes, there were a number of high ranking Nazis who escaped to Argentina as the war came to an end. Yes, the Catholic Church had some involvement in those escapes. But there's no evidence that I know of that any huge amount of German gold went with them or that there was any intention or desire to start a "Fourth Reich." Most of them just wanted to escape prosecution for war crimes. So, there's a grain of truth to this story (as there generally is with all legends) but it is a fictional story - and to its credit, it makes no claim otherwise. It opens with captions offering a description of the anti-Hitler German underground - although it overstates the significance of the movement: the vast majority of Nazis (and even every day Germans) remained loyal to Hitler, or at least unwilling to do anything against him - and it closes with captions describing the exodus of some Nazis to South America, and then offering some thoughts about the co-operation between the Americans and the Soviets during the war.Now, there's the point of the story, I think. Using the aftermath of the failed Operation Valkyrie as the context, the movie really offers a portrayal of a group of American (and one British) members of a special ops team parachuted into East Prussia to extract an anti-Nazi German officer who has information valuable to the Allies who are forced to co-operate with a Soviet special ops team working in the same area. The American team is led by Sean Patrick Flanery as Capt. Blackburn and the Soviet team by Pasha D. Lychnikoff as Maj. Kulkov (who I recognized from his turn as an astronaut on a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory.) Personally, I thought Lychnikoff offered the stronger performance of the two. Distrustful of each other at first, the two teams have to begin to work together against their common enemy (and, as they were deep behind enemy lines, their common threat.) A lot of that is pretty typical war movie stuff. There are a lot of firefights, and most of them are entirely unbelievable as this small number of Allied soldiers repeatedly takes down innumerable German soldiers. But it's a war movie. You expect that.The most intriguing character in the movie was probably Elke - the very pretty secretary of one of the German officers seeking escape to Argentina - who was actually a part of the Kreisau Circle, which was in fact one of the major anti-Hitler conspiracies. She was played by the very pretty Julie Engelbrecht, an actress largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic, most of whose work has been done in Germany. She is, indeed, very pretty - and she does a good job in the role, and I thought Elke was an important character who in a way represented to me the future of Germany, torn between East and West. Actually, the whole movie seems to be a sort of setting up of the Cold War more than counting down the last days of World War II.No one is going to watch this and think it's one of the great World War II movies. The whole story is just a bit too outlandish to be taken seriously. But it has its moments of excitement. (6/10)

But poorly told, in a rather comic-book fashion. Both the allied planning for the post-war recovery of Europe and the nazi planning to escape the debacle and rebuild the Reich in Argentina are worthy of further examination in the cinema. But here we had comic-book heroes with comic-book lines - the token Brit was portrayed as a trouble-making Cockney with a foul mouth and no sense of teamwork. A welcome appearance by Rutger Hauer, alongside Julie Engelbrecht as anti-nazis, raised the level a bit and the idea of Yanks and Ruskies working together in a common cause was well intentioned. But one was left with the impression that this was just another episode of Captain America.

This movie is sub-par. It is very poorly acted and everyone looks the same. The screenplay and plotting are over wrought and not the least bit compelling. I cannot say enough bad things about this movie. At the very least it could've had some decent action, but no. It was severely lacking in this department as well. It was flat and dull and excruciating to watch. Watching a heart monitor with a flat-line for 100 minutes would be more entertaining. Whoever was in charge of foisting this to the movie-going world was sorely misguided. If you're going to be bad at least be bad with some excitement. There wasn't a single exciting moment in this movie. AVOID!!!!

****Only watch this movie if you have a family member in the cast or crew.****With all the production values of a 'Young Indiana Jones' Movie from days of yore, and indeed the star himself, this movie deserves to be no better than it is.The story is nothing we haven't seen before, the script is pretty dire and the hackneyed plot, containing ham-fisted leaden interludes intended to develop the audience' rapport with the cardboard characters are almost too painful to watch.I was particularly intrigued by the superficial performances of all the German characters, whose stereo-typification seemed to be based entirely on those WWII mini comics they used to publish between the 1950's and 1980's in the UK. I am only surprised the entire script didn't ask for every German soldier to say 'Achtung' before speaking every line.This movie made at this time is anachronistic in the extreme, why bother - in the 1960's it might have had some legs (although its no Von Ryan's Express), in the 80's it would be a straight to DVD, nearly 70 years after the fact, why bother, no one cares and that includes the actors for the most part.We in the movie business call this (technical jargon warning) a real stinker, a total pile of dog....., you get the picture.My advice is don't bother. I gave it 1 star, not because it is that bad, but because I watched it as it had 5.4 stars. I wanted to redress the balance as someones clearly been inflating the IMDb stars to ensure reviews like mine.****Only watch this movie if you have a family member in the cast or crew****