Great story obviously but oh dear, those clichés

Rating: Null/10 (14 January 2006)

I remember the events of the Munich Olympics 1972 fairly clearly. I was 17 at the time, and resident in England. It made a big impression, watching it unfold on the BBC, the vivid images played out on TV. The slaughtered athletes, the botched German security job, the debate over continuing the games (they did but shouldn't have.) I remember the hijackings, Leila Khaled, Black September, Bader Meinhoff, The Red Brigade, the IRA, all that early terrorism that rather passed America by in the pre-9/11 world. So I was predisposed to appreciate this story, and it was certainly time that the story was told. I can't exactly say that I was predisposed to enjoy it. Is it right to enjoy a true story about a real-life slaughter? You can't possibly analyze the story, all you can do is analyze the telling of it, which is what I'll try and do.
To me, this movie is a classic example of how to ruin a really good story by throwing every cliché in the book at it. There were parts of it I loved. Eric Bana's performance, for example, was really outstanding, by far the best I've seen him give. It certainly works on the level of a thriller, as we watch the shadowy team of Israelis track down the shadowy team of Palestinians across Europe. I found the mental disintegration, self-doubt and mounting paranoia of Avner very believable, and the individual details of the kills were quite fascinating, although the lingering shot of the bullet wounds over the pretty Dutch assassin's breasts was perhaps slightly overdone.
The trouble is that Spielberg doesn't just set the scene for us as we move from country to country, he hits us over the head with it and then grinds our noses into it just in case we missed anything. To give a few examples. London. In the space of half a city block we are shown two red telephone booths, a red post box, a red London bus (double decker of course), a Mini Cooper, a Ford Zephyr and a black taxicab. And just in case you missed any of those, it's raining. This is London, OK? London. L-O-N-D-O-N. All it lacked was a Cheery Cockney Chappie to run up to our hero and say "Mornin' Mate" for it to have included every London cliché from A to Z (although had that happened I might well have got up and left.) Then there's the "Oh look, it must be Paris, I can see the Eiffel Tower" scene. And everyone was smoking at the table and mentioned cheese frequently, so we'd know they were REALLY French, not masquerading Belgians. Was that the Spanish Steps in Rome? We have bikes and canals in Holland, and Hey! it's Brooklyn, she lives in a brownstone and there are the friendly neighbors sitting on the steps! All Spielberg spared us was an aerial shot of the Acropolis in Greece. Is it a necessity for geographically challenged American audiences to be bludgeoned over the head with all this visual imagery so they'll have no doubts about where they are? Did someone in the props department find a locked closet with "Europe" written on the door and insist on using everything they found inside dating from every European movie made since 1930? The head-tossing sex scene towards the end, cutting between the violence and Avner's trauma also made me shake my head in disbelief that anyone as good as Spielberg could throw in such an obvious cliché.
The London street scene actually reminded me of Austin Powers, and that really wasn't the memory I wanted to retain of this movie, because it makes some very good points, chief amongst them being that for every terrorist you kill, ten more will stand up to take their place (especially true if you kill parents in front of their children.) And that exacting revenge has a terrible effect on the avenger. And did the Americans really make a Faustian pact with Black September to keep terrorism out of the USA? Interesting and thought provoking stuff, and yet it was thrown in almost as an after thought. That one question would make a great movie all by itself.
But I'm afraid mostly this movie just made me sigh. Am I getting too old to go to the movies any more? Is there anyone left out there who can make a movie devoid of cliché? Because for me this ruined what should have been a deeply moving story. But at least it has left me wanting to know more about the story, more about what happened after Munich, so it wasn't a total loss. Maybe I'll go and look for a book about it. With no pictures.