Did not expect this from Spielberg

Rating: 5/10 (14 January 2006)

This movie made me very, very angry.
Only an ardent supporter of Israel, who knows all the facts and past history, will not see this movie as sharply anti-Israel. For an *average* person this film is a pinnacle of irresponsible movie making.
There is something Spielberg and many other liberal Americans (and I am a liberal person myself) don't understand: some guys are just violent freaks! No amount of reasoning and dialog would've changed Hitler, Stalin, or Saddam. Showing a Palestinian terrorist with agony on his face - almost driven to tears! - as he was executing five hostages by an automatic weapon epitomizes this dangerous misconception.
The bulk of the movie is spent showing in details the Palestinian assassinations carried out by the Mossad team. The well-paid mysterious source of their names and whereabouts (a fictional character) is a "black box" which hides away most other details, allowing good two hours of the movie to focus solely on the killings. The very first target sets the tone: a very pleasant and courteous gray-haired man who was just applauded by his Italian audience in a streetside café in Rome after speaking about his translation of 1001 Arabian Nights into Italian, who is killed with a bag of groceries in his hands - milk, wine, bread he just bought at a corner store. Milk flows on the marble foyer floor, followed by blood, as the Mossad agents run away out on the street like children who have just done some booboo.
One of the more poignant speeches comes from a young Palestinian fighter, later killed, an actor with beautiful, expressive eyes, saying that home and land mean everything, even if it will take hundreds of years to take them back. "How long did the Jews wait to get their country? We'll wait, make children, children will make children, and we'll get it back." He sounds prophetic; Avner, the team leader, has nothing to reply to that.
Throughout the movie periods between the killings are punctuated by TV newsreels about new Palestinian terrorist acts, highlighting the main point of the movie: violence begets violence; vengeance like this for an unspeakable atrocity of Munich massacre is NOT an acceptable answer. Even more irresponsibly, the movie implies that there is no solid evidence, the kind a liberal Western person expects - especially in this era of political lies and intelligence lapses about Iraq - linking most of the assassination targets to the Munich massacre. That's untrue - and dangerous.
Avner's torment results in the ultimate anti-Israel statement of the movie: from the initial sentiment, expressed by his wife, that "Israel is his mother", he travels the whole path to basically the rejection of Israel by immigrating to Brooklyn at the end of the movie.
As for the cinematic quality of the movie itself (which is too long for what it does with most of its time) - when Avner passionately screws his wife while having flashbacks - rather, fantasies, since he couldn't have witnessed it himself - of the Munich hostages being killed, all I wanted to ask was, "How was sex - good?" If this is the roof of Spielberg's "artistic symbolism", he really should stay with "Jaws", I'm sorry...