Unfortunately "Courageous" Doesn't Equate "Good Movie"

Rating: Null/10 (8 March 2006)

After the Oscar-awarded but factually flawed "One Day In September" I was really curious how Spielberg would treat the subject. And judging by the media hooplah, Spielberg had apparently gone off his rocker and turned out a shlocker that advocated the complete annihilation of Israel, or something to that effect. As it turned out, "Munich" falls short of both counts -- it's mostly an action movie with little regard for historical accuracy that seeks to propagate an agenda that I would term "slightly mellowed Zionism". I would have thought that Spielberg's position is in accordance with what seems to be official doctrine, that the existence of Israel is non-negotiable and that Israel has the right to defend herself, but that she is not simply awarded carte blanche for doing so. Strangely, judging by the uproar surrounding this movie, I seem to have been out of synch with reality in that at least a large part of media commentators seems to assume that Israelis are beyond the pale of moral considerations and somehow invested with unalienable right to act with complete impunity.
But back to the movie. It's actually quite convincing as a sort of alternative James Bond movie, one in which the hero is married with children and has moral qualms, but as such it almost mandatorily falls short of its claim as a polical movie or as a truthful -- if not factually accurate -- portrayal of a historical event. Maybe you can't have both, or at least Spielberg, in this case, couldn't. The film eventually hits rock-bottom in an unforgivable scene in which Avner and his wife play a round of "hide the kreplach" interspersed by stroboscopic takes from the final shootout of the Munich hijack.