An Eye for an Eye Leaves the Whole Film Bland

Rating: 4/10 (28 July 2015)

Munich (2005)
In the wake of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, a team of Mossad agents are tasked with hunting down those responsible.
After a gripping re-enactment of the Black September Palestinians storming the Olympic village, intercut seamlessly with archive footage, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) puts together a team to seek revenge. A potential maelstrom of dodgy accents (Australians Eric Bana and Geoffrey Rush playing Israelis, English Daniel Craig playing a South African) is mercifully avoided and the team start working down their list of eleven Palestinians who are in hiding throughout Europe.
Here are the stronger moments of Munich; the early assassinations are tightly paced set-pieces where Avner's (Eric Bana) hesitance to murder people is apparent. Eric Bana is excellent as the tortured Avner, and makes the most of an out of step script by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, struggling to maintain the constant globe-trotting and hazy time scale, with a quiet, affecting central performance. What Bana can't pull off is the sense of a close knit team that several of the film's key dramatic moments depend on. At almost three hours long, the team's dynamic still feels underdeveloped and two members, Hans (Hanns Zischler) and Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz) are reduced to heist movie archetypes; the numbers and explosives guy.
Then there's the weird stuff: a mysterious French intelligence group led by Bond villain father and son Michael Lonsdale and Mathieu Amalric. Forgetting that the group was never supposed to exist, so sits strangely in a film that takes authenticity seriously, you get the sense the film could have benefited from losing this plot strand altogether, in favour of developing the team. There's also the team's reactionary murder of a female assassin, who is shot naked on her houseboat. It's played to portray Hans perverse titillation as he re-opens her robe on her bloody body, but feels jarring and false, as we haven't seen enough of Hans to believe he's become that damaged. The inexplicable use of high contrast in many shots, works against the excellent set design and costuming by making the '70s agents look like they're recording a grunge music video. It also sometimes bleaches out the sky giving scenes shot on location a fuzzy, green screened look.
Spielberg's message appears to be 'an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind', which is a noble, if light thematic fare for a film of it's length. In it's final moments, Anver predicts that the violence will only get worse and points out that everyone they have killed has been replaced by someone worse. Spielberg pans back to a lingering shot of the distant World Trade Center; a forced gut-punch in the wake of a story which fails to engage an audience with it's human drama.
**
A well intended misfire that could have done with a shorter run time and by focussing as tightly on it's main characters as it does on it's set-pieces.