Intriguing But Rather Hollow Morality Tale Of Israeli Secret Agent Assassins

Rating: 6/10 (16 August 2009)

Following the kidnap and murder of the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the Palestinian terrorist organisation Black September, a team of Mossad secret agents are tasked with killing all those known to have planned the attack. Avner, the lead operative, goes about this grim work with skill and resolve, but slowly finds himself increasingly paranoid and disillusioned with the futility of revenge
As with all of Spielberg's work, this film is immaculately constructed, with exceptionally fine attention to detail as Rome, Nicosia, Beirut, Athens, London and New York in the early seventies are brilliantly reconstructed. It's also particularly well edited, with several sequences stylishly intercutting between scenes to great dramatic effect. It also tackles one of the most difficult political issues there has ever been - the Arab-Israeli conflict - with feeling, intelligence and objectivity, and those who have derided it as both pro and anti-Zionist propaganda are, in a word, wrong. However, the movie's mixture of politics and thriller don't work very well - the action scenes aren't that tense, the gun-battles don't have bite because we don't know the victims and the deaths of Avner's three colleagues are puzzling and inexplicable. Avner's descent into guilt and indecision over his actions is laudably acted but weakly written - the morality of being a paid assassin is explored with much more vigour and honesty in films like Leon or Grosse Pointe Blank. The problem with movies "inspired by real events" (man, I hate that phrase) is that filmmakers feel a moral responsibility to report like journalists, rather than entertain, which is what movies do best, and so often settle for a watered down middle ground. Compare this film with something like Brian DePalma's Mission Impossible; it too has stylish European layouts and moral dilemmas aplenty, but also fabulous car chases, sneaky intrigue and neato spy stuff, since it's unfettered by any chains to reality. Well played throughout by an unusual international mix of actors; the five Israeli agents are really an Australian, an Irishman, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a German ! I particularly like Hinds as the bespectacled cleanup man, who seems the most professional but ends up making the stupidest mistake, and Lonsdale and Cohen both have flashy parts as a Don Corleone-style patriarch and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir respectively. This is a moving, extremely well made, thought-provoking film, but in the end its potted mixture of history and fiction make it dull and sober. Based on a book by journalist George Jonas and filmed before in 1986 as a Canadian TV-movie called Sword Of Gideon.