murky morality, powerful execution

Rating: 8/10 (15 January 2006)

"Munich" is a pseudo-docu-thriller that is brilliantly stylized and performed, with a rollicking pace that makes its near-three-hour run time pass with surprising efficiency. While this dramatization of the events that followed the massacre of 11 athletes at the 1972 Olympics at Munich is, at heart, rather basic revenge fodder, and its message of "Who are the REAL terrorists?" is less than profound, Steven Spielberg makes every moment count. Eric Bana is an Israeli leading an innocuous team of everyman 'experts' (one skilled in bookkeeping; another in explosives, etc.) across Europe to search out and kill the masterminds behind the Munich massacre. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that the issue at hand is NOT the 'bad men,' but the principle of violence/vengeance itself, and the effects it has on the morality of the individual; Spielberg uses flashbacks of the actual Munich crimes as a simple method of iterating this. The group of men exhibit a heartfelt rapport on par with the company in "Saving Private Ryan"; the violence is handled in a similar way, with gritty choreography and cringe-inducing sound effects that drive the feeling home. Of all the films that have come out in the wake of 9/11, "Munich" might be the most attuned to our current attitudes and mentalities, while giving us a fittingly ambiguous answer to the question of violence itself.
7.5/10