The Five Best and Worst Movie Last Words

Five Best Movie Final Words

5. "What say you now, gentleman," says Federal Judge Justin Beach in Bad Company while looking at a picture of fellow judges just before riding the bullet.

4. "MMMMMMMMRRRFFFFFF!" says Gene Simmons just before the grenade Rutger Hauer taped to his mouth goes off in Wanted: Dead or Alive.

3. "What's that smell?" says Fight Club's Tyler Durden before blowing a smoke ring and right after alter ago "Jack" eats a bullet.

2. "You just shat in the one apple pie that knows how to shit back," says self-proclaimed tough guy Hank in Club Dread before promptly getting sliced open.

1. "We die" says Lord Kril from The Last Starfighter, when asked the insipid question: "What do we do?" when about to collide with a moon. In the pregnant pause before these words, Krill's cool little wrap around orange-shaded monocle slides into place.

Five Worst Movie Final Words

5. "Diplomatic immunity" says antagonist Arjen Rudd in Lethal Weapon 2 before Danny Glover puts a bullet between his eyes.

4. "Okay" says Matt Damon in The Departed when coming home to find a CSI-be-damned Mark Walhberg wrapped in plastic and holding a silenced gun.

3. "Fajajrualladuwla!" yells Tom Cruise in Valkyrie before being gunned down by a firing squad. The only thing I can figure is that he finally broke back into German and he was saying: "Please don't shoot!"

2. "But" and "I" say the twins aptly named Igg and Ook in Hudson Hawk before being shot by Sandra Friggin' Bernhard for failing their mission.

1. "But this is my home" says patriarch Jim Dahlberg in The Day After when confronting a roaming family settled on his land, who promptly shot him in the gut. Apparently this guy figured that after a full-scale nuclear holocaust people should still abide by property rights. Good thinkin'.

"Valkyrie" swoops down on conventional wisdom

Watching Valkyrie immediately makes me realize that my "survey" understanding of WWII is woefully inadequate. We have a sort of blimp's eye view of wars sometimes, where we assume that it was purely manicheistic: the bad guys wore black and the good guys wore white, and the good guys won. With real life never quite panning out like that, Valkyrie does an excellent job of showing one of the many insurrection attempts on Hitler's Germany, with politics and paranoia that smacks of V for Vendetta. Director Bryan Singer was on his A game, which means I can finally forgive him for not directing X-Men III.
What I appreciated was the amount of minutia surrounding the actual attempted coup. In some movies, such as The Perfect Storm, you have a level of circumstantial detail that builds the tension you feel and the connection you have to the characters. Yet at the end of Storm, we find out that no one lived to tell the tale. I felt completely jipped, especially when the movie touted itself as "based on a true story." Story, indeed. Now, I can't stomach the melodramatic moment in Storm, knowing they are all hearsay and guesswork.
In Valkyrie, however, those very details are true; the product of meticulous research, historical record, and even reenactments. This makes the film much more enjoyable, especially since it is surrounding such an important time in our recent history.
If you are going to Valkyrie for Mission Impossible you will be sorely disappointed. If you are going in order to see a facet of history that has almost entirely slipped through the cracks of the modern historical canon, then you will enjoy it. It is well-paced, well-acted, and has an excellent cast. That said, the only drawback I see will be felt by the producers, and that is that - given the way that the story unfolds - I don't see a huge market for repeat views, so I predict mediocre DVD sales. I would watch it twice, but I could understand how a single viewing would suffice for most.
Too, there seemed to be a slew of accents: some trying for German, some more British, and Tom Cruise sticking with, well, Tom Cruise. While it would have been nice to enforce a bit of consistency here, it was only a minute detail that goes largely unnoticed.
Any evidence to the contrary is welcome in the comments section, as are all other observations, opinions, etc.