In this historical thriller, rumours of Hitler’s death are much exaggerated. Tom Cruise is similarly hard to kill off. He plays Claus von Stauffenberg, the one-eyed aristocrat who made an attempt on the Führer’s life in 1944 then tricked Hitler’s Reserve Army into arresting members of the SS.

Valkyrie has been enjoying disaster status for over a year, yet it is doing fine at the US box office and it will almost certainly do well here too. Even at its silliest — and the moments involving Eddie Izzard as a splenetic communications operative are extremely silly — the film is involving, and Cruise does exactly what’s required as Claus.

He charges around in his uniforms with great aplomb yet looks suitably haunted when faced with truths that his character doesn’t want to face.

The sets and locations, meanwhile, are magnificently stark — just as you would expect from X-Men director Bryan Singer. The replica of Hitler’s Bergof estate in Bavaria looks especially authentic, while the crisp forests surrounding his Wolf’s Lair resemble a Klimt painting come to life. Look out, too, for the gleaming swimming pool tiles that form a swastika.

Yet the confusion at the heart of Christopher McQuarrie’s script creates a huge sense of unease. There are only two references to Hitler’s final solution (Von Stauffenberg talks about the treatment of the Jews in a letter and later says he wants to “close the concentration camps”.) We never see any evidence of these horrors. David Bamber’s Hitler has a brooding face and a stern voice that makes your toes tingle and says deep things such as, “One cannot understand Russian socialism if one does not understand Wagner.”

This could be viewed as sophisticated storytelling. Singer and his childhood friend McQuarrie want to show that “bad guys” aren’t necessarily stupid or wicked 24 hours a day. Yet by the end it would be easy to forget that Hitler wanted to exterminate Jews, gays, gypsies and socialists. Here he just seems interested in winning the war and that he inspires devotion in no-nonsense military men makes total sense.

It is the conspirators who actually emerge as self-serving, spineless and/or deluded. The ridiculous policy of allowing all the actors (except Bamber) to talk in their own accents also sends an odd, subliminal message. The members of the German Resistance all sound like Brits and Yanks. With two exceptions, the men loyal to Hitler talk with German accents. As a result, they seem like real, “pure” Germans, while the plotters come across as outsiders.

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We are, of course, encouraged to will on Claus’s mission but I worry that many audience members, especially youngsters who don’t know much about the war (note the film’s 12A certificate), will experience a thrill of admiration for Adolf and his faithful band.

It is not cinema’s job to educate. That said, you don’t expect it to misinform. It’s possible that the Jewish, openly gay Singer is blameless — that crucial, contextualising scenes have been cut to keep the story “tight” and that, in the process, an ambitious attempt to dissect the notion of heroism has been foiled. The end result, however, is a skewed picture that manages to promote Hollywood-style derring-do and make fascism look more stylish and profound than it has done in years.

What a coup.