Hamlet in Tel Aviv

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2006)

As a thriller, "Munich" works very well. Unfortunately, Kushner, Roth, and Spielberg felt the need to overlay the thriller with a political statement. Thus, we are faced with an assassin who talks like Hamlet, because he has to talk for Kushner & Co. It is difficult to get involved in an action movie when even the main character's heart is not in it.
At the beginning of the movie, Avner (the main character) is offered a clear choice: to join the mission or not; and he decides to join. Then, after killing his first target, he begins to feel moral qualms. Some of his team mates react in the same way. Nothing strange about that, and yet their crisis of conscience does not seem sincere: their words and actions hardly betray any feelings about killing. Instead, they talk about the abstract morality of their mission, and its likely consequences. They are almost too cerebral to be recognizable as human characters. They do not amount to much as philosophers, either. Their discussions offer no more insight than: killing is bad.
To be fair to this Hamletic hit squad, part of their problem is that they are faced by conflicting information: first they are told that new terrorists are recruited by terrorist attacks, like Munich; later they are told, or tell themselves, that killing terrorists creates more terrorists. Damned if you don't, and damned if you do.
This cognitive dissonance takes its toll on Avner. In one scene, he empathizes with a terrorist who wants to kick all Jews out of Palestine. In another scene, flashbacks of his terrifying experience in Munich do nothing to inhibit his sexual performance. A psychiatrist could make a career out of studying this guy!
Once more, apart from the psychological flaws, the movie is actually very good. The logic of Avner wanting to take part in the Beirut operation is pretty shaky (did Avner want his informers to know that he was in it, or not? and why go there in either case?); the way Avner buys information looks too easy to be true; but otherwise I found the plot believable. Even the physics is realistic: nobody flies off backwards when hit by a bullet, for instance. It would have been a great movie if Kushner & Co. had allowed the story to speak for itself.
As a footnote, the statement "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values" (see memorable quotes) is questionable. It is hard to believe that the ancient Mongols or the Vikings ever had to compromise their values. The Icelandic sagas show that the "cycle of violence" is easily broken, when both sides accept that the other side is going to stand up for its rights. Genghis Khan had his own (quite effective) way to break the "cycle of violence". Maybe the Viking and ancient Mongol cultures do not count as civilizations, but even so, they are still valid as proof of concept; so it would have made more sense to say: "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own unrealistic expectations". But then the statement becomes a tautology.