Overrated

Rating: Null/10 (31 December 2005)

This is the usual battle of Spielberg the master craftsman versus Spielberg the middlebrow thinker. Much like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the movie this in fact most resembles, it's a back and forth kind of battle. In the end MUNICH much like RYAN works better in small bits: as a whole it's failure.
The movie's too long, irritatingly so. A good half hour could've been trimmed from this easily.
I'm not sure what I think of Bana, I've liked him in other things I've seen of him, but he's pretty mediocre here. None of the characters we see are especially deep, but the other performers (particularly Rush and Craig) do their best with what they've got. No such luck with Bana, who's a stolid performer in the best of times.
This is a movie that thinks it's a lot smarter than it really is. The main theme is probably something like "this is all pointless", which by definition makes the revenge plot by-the-way. Which is the point, I'm sure, but it doesn't make for interesting cinema. Another way to say it is that large parts of this movie are just boring, despite all the explosions.
Okay, so the themes of the movie are presumably more important. Even if we probe deeper, though, the "argument" is overly simplistic. Once we get past the massacre itself, every Palestinian is seen as sympathetic and reasonable, while most Jews are crazy, or crooked, or naive, or creepy. The deck is ridiculously stacked, and that's not subtlety, that's comic book stuff. At the end of the movie, Spielberg and (more likely) Kushner hint at a lot of things they don't want to say outright: there are specific correspondences drawn between the terrorists and the Israelis, for instance. The validity of that point to one side, the reluctance of these two to give it a proper airing can only be considered an aesthetic failure.
In a year of overrated movies, this is one of the biggest.