Failed opportunity to illuminate Palestinian terrorism; instead we mainly get James Bond redux

Rating: 8/10 (22 January 2006)

Docudrama about the Israeli-sponsored counter-terrorism team assembled (with the blessings of Golda Meir, Israel's Prime Minister at the time) to retaliate against the Palestinian terrorists and their co-conspirators responsible for slaying 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team and staff at the 1972 Munich Olympiad. The screenplay - by resident Broadway genius Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, who also wrote "Forrest Gump," "The Horse Whisperer" and "The Insider" - is based on a book by George Jones, entitled "Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team."
Ever the entertainer, first and foremost, Steven Spielberg gives us no insights about the causes of Palestinian or Islamic terrorism, but, rather, a high intensity, slick action movie on the order of the James Bond flicks. We even have a bomb maker who creates too cute, one of a kind, overly gimmicky devices tailored unnecessarily for each assassination, just like the lethal toymakers in the Bond stories. (Maybe it really happened that way; my point is, why did Spielberg dwell on such techie details when there were more weighty issues to address?) The pace is fast, and as the team take out one anonymous, one dimensional bad guy after another, with ingenious methods and plenty of risk-based tension, I could not resist being caught up in the excitement of blood sport on display here.
As for more serious geopolitical subtexts, we do get misgivings expressed about the whole notion of revenge embodied by this team - an eye for an eye, Talion Law, the Code of Hammurabi, the raison d'etre for their lethal mission. Occasional doubts about the mission do furl the brow of the serious minded Avner (Eric Bana), recruited from within Mossad, Israel's CIA, to lead the team, but only in passing. His ambivalence seems easily patched up. The bigshots behind the mission  people like Mrs. Meir (Lynn Cohen) and the team's Mossad supervisor, Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush)  have no doubts at all that history and God are on their side.
The other four team members are an interesting lot, but we really don't get to know them all that well, even in the expanse of 2 hours, 44 minutes film running time. The chief trigger man, Steve, is played by a coolly psychopathic, baby blue eyed Daniel Craig (Ted Hughes in Sylvia; the latest actor to be anointed for the James Bond series role). Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz) is the bomb maker, recruited for this task because of credentials that are at best equivocal: he was formerly a toy maker and bomb dismantler. Turns out that some of his devices are too powerful, causing collateral damage. Carl (Ciaran Hinds) is an expert in obliterating evidence, traces of the team members' identities. Hans (Hanns Zischler) is a master document forger. The group wine and dine their way around Europe in elegant circumstances between assassinations, another Bond-like touch, however true it may have been.
A fascinating side story here concerns a Paris-based Mafia-like family that indulges in espionage and other dirty tricks for hire. Avner contacts a son, Louis (Mathieu Amalric) and pays handsomely ($100K per person) for information on the whereabouts of people the team wants to take out. Louis eventually takes a blindfolded Avner to meet the family's leader, Louis's father, called simply "Papa" (Michael Lonsdale), a stout avuncular fellow who takes a liking to Avner that stirs jealous sentiments within Louis. The world of this amoral French crime family would serve as excellent fare for expanded treatment, perhaps in some other film.
Just in recent months we have witnessed an rapidly emerging and maturing cinema of contemporary terrorism ("The War Within," "Paradise Now," "The Friend," "Syriana"), to which "Munich" adds something, but not a lot. To be sure, the violent practice of Talion law still dominates relations between Israel and Palestine. And, at one point in the film, Louis plays a fiendish little trick on Avner and his mates. They are put up in a safe house in Arab territory, Yemen as I recall. Late in the evening, in troup another gang also instructed to use the same safe house. They are Arab terrorists. A long, tense, guns-drawn moment ensues, but the situation is defused when Avner's team passes itself off as a leftist German terror cell (think Bader-Meinhoff or Red Brigade). An intriguing discussion between Avner and the Arab team leader follows, about the historic inevitability of their causes. The Arab leader says that Islam will prevail against the West, even if it takes 100 years.
This is one of the film's best scenes. But much of "Munich" seems like a throwback, a film that would have been more timely in the 1980s perhaps, but less so now. The hit team's targets are people we never meet or learn about only superficially. We don't know why they did what they did to contribute to "Black September." It is unfortunate that with the immense resources at his disposal, Mr. Spielberg could not have reached for something less showy, more edifying to our understanding of the dynamics of contemporary terrorism. My rating: 7.5/10 (low B+). (Film seen 01/09/06). If you'd like to read more of my reviews, send me a message for directions to my websites.