Munich
**
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Tony Kushner
and Eric Roth
Starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush, Ciaran Hinds
Classification: 14A
Bouncing about from one flawed movie to another, Steven Spielberg has lost his way of late, and Munich finds him more disoriented than ever. Always a gifted technician but never the deepest thinker, Spielberg is typically most at ease travelling the thematic high road that pits pretty good against really evil. Here, to his credit, he's trying to move off that bright track into the dense thickets where morality comes only in troubling shades of grey. But his efforts are as laboured as the result -- he's playing to his weaknesses here, and it shows. What's worse, even his strengths, especially his kinetic flair with the camera, seem to have partly abandoned him, and what wants to be a film about the murky world of terrorism ends up simply as a murky film.
The title, of course, refers to the infamous '72 Olympics in the German city of Munich, when Palestinian extremists launched a terrorist raid that led to the death of 11 Israeli hostages. The start, at least, is masterfully fast as, mixing archival footage with fictionalized recreations, the opening frames introduce the tragedy in its early hours, move ahead to the televised announcement of the death toll, then cut away to the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, delivering her now-celebrated dictum: "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." What follows is a meandering, near-three-hour dramatization of that compromise -- specifically, her government's secret formation of a retributive hit-squad charged with assassinating the men, also 11 in number, deemed responsible for the Munich massacre.
It's a revenge tale, then, a violent counteraction wrought on a global scale from the purest of motives, but done in defiance of international law and in contradiction of one's "own values." The contemporary parallels are obvious and should have us deeply engaged. But they don't, because the script -- a disappointing ramble from Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner in tandem with Eric Roth -- never gets beneath the transparent surface of the moral dilemma. Instead, like a schoolboy in the first flush of ethical discovery, it just keeps repeating variations on the same old question of whether the end can justify the means.
In between this repetitive chorus, we get an action flick. Not a very coherent action flick, it turns out, since the narrative demands that the hit squad traipse through half the capitals of Europe to do their dirty work. But, before the tough job begins, there's the Mission Impossible preface. A stern case officer (Geoffrey Rush) briefs Avner the team leader (Eric Bana) on the nasty tenor of the gig ("You do what the terrorists do"), leading to a meet-and-greet dinner with the other members of the squad, each with his specialized skill -- the bomb wizard (Mathieu Kassovitz), the document forger (Hanns Zischler), the clean-up expert (Ciaran Hinds), the brash getaway driver (Daniel Craig).
Introductions over, they fly to Rome to gun down Target #1 in cold blood; then it's off to Paris to dispose of #2, despite his charming wife and cute young daughter; to Cyprus for genial #3, Beirut for a montage of 4, 5 and 6. Problem is, the arithmetic is as daunting as the running time -- we're into the movie's third hour and there's still a full quintet left on the shopping list. En route, information is bought at a hefty price from some shadowy French godfather, while firefights break out with unknown groups for unknown reasons. If we're getting a bit confused by now -- who exactly is being killed? who else is involved? -- it comes as small consolation that the hit squad seems to share our bewilderment.
