One of Spielberg's best - an important and thought-provoking film

Rating: 9/10 (2 January 2007)

"Munich" is not an easy film to watch - it is realistically (and sometimes gratuitously) violent, it is disturbing, it can be rather hard to follow at times, and it is quite long (at nearly three hours) - but it is a rewarding film that provokes thought...something which, unfortunately, many Hollywood films fail to accomplish these days.
It is very loosely based on the aftermath of Black September and the 1972 Munich Massacre in Germany, during which eleven Israeli athletes were slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists who had tried to use the hostages as leverage in a political battle.
Following the attack, the Israeli government assembled a crew of Jewish men to travel across West Europe and assassinate the figures involved in the planning of the events in Munich. The team of five is led by the character portrayed by Eric Bana, and he begins to wrestle with his own tormented conscious as he questions whether his actions are just or if he is merely being used as a pawn to carry out secret government killings.
The cast is top-notch, and it's one of Spielberg's most well-directed films in ages. It's refreshing to see this after a string of generic no-brainers such as "War of the Worlds" and "The Terminal." This echoes "Saving Private Ryan" and "Schindler's List" as some of the riskiest material Spielberg has worked with, but he manages to pull it off without taking sides (as many have tried to twist it into some type of Israel-.vs.-Pakistan debate). He also manages to take the material - of which there isn't much available documented facts - and make it compelling and engaging without necessarily going out of his way to distort facts. In his DVD introduction, Spielberg explains that creative liberties had to be taken simply due to the fact that no one has "come out" yet and really released any definitive information on what, exactly, happened after the Munich massacre. The only thing that's known is that a group was assembled, and nine of eleven targets were assassinated across Europe in the months that followed.
The film provokes discussion and, although some better editing could have brought its runtime down a good twenty minutes or so, Spielberg proves once again that when he's at the top of his game he really is a great director - one can only hope that he begins to work like Scorsese and choose his projects more carefully.