>>REVIEW
MUNICH
STARRING Eric Bana, Daniel Craig and Ciaran Hinds
DIRECTED BY Steven Spielberg
Opens Friday, January 6
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Given the cinematic and political climate of the moment – Hollywood is being blamed for the downturn in theatre attendance, while President Bush is being blamed for the escalating problems in the Iraq war – Steven Spielberg’s film about the terrorist act at the 1972 Olympic Games seemed primed to confront the hot-button issues facing both the country and Tinseltown in one fell swoop. And while Munich, an earnest examination of the post-Munich retaliation against the Palestinian terrorists responsible for killing 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympics, attempts to take on the big issues of the day without simplifying, Spielberg’s film ultimately waters itself down to little more than an elaborately played moral spy game.
Spielberg’s film, which chronicles the Israeli government’s covert attempt at retaliating after the bloodshed in Munich, follows a terrorist cell that is launched in Europe to hunt down a list of Palestinians. Led by Avner (Eric Bana), an Israeli policeman whose father is something of a hometown hero for his service as a bodyguard to the prime minister, the cell is made up of supposedly average citizens who were chosen specifically for their distance government affairs.
Avner sets off for Europe, where he’s to meet with his team and quietly do away with Palestinian after Palestinian.
The rest of the crew – bomb specialist maker (Mathieu Kassovitz), a brassy English Jew (Daniel Craig) and a reserved intellectual (Ciaran Hinds) proceed with Avner on the mission, becoming more and more entangled with the drawbacks of both the secret agent lifestyle and the terrorist lifestyle.
As the killing begets more killing, pesky problems of conscience and fear start gnawing away at the group. And, as the targets grow and the missions become more dangerous, questions begin to surface about who’s pulling the strings.
Based loosely on George Jonas’s book Vengeance (which itself caused controversy for its allegedly loose take on the aftermath of the Munich killings), Spielberg’s film often plays more like a downbeat Bond movie than a political film.
Despite its attempts to tackle the topic of terrorism without ignoring its complexities, Munich does seem to fall back to a familiar Spielberg construct of right versus wrong. That terrorism, like war (another topic Spielberg similarly boiled down in Saving Private Ryan), begs questions about the value of human life and the effectiveness of killing as a means to political end, is nothing new. And despite its sometimes circuitous and involved plot, Munich doesn’t seem to be saying much more than that. For a film that should leave you with more questions than answers, Munich is surprisingly and disappointingly open and shut. |
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