THE STORY – After the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and their coach at the 1972 Olympics, the Israeli government secretly assigns Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana) to carry out a series of strategic retaliations. With the help of a driver (Daniel Craig), a forger (Hanns Zischler), a bomb-maker (Mathieu Kassovitz) and aformer soldier (Ciarán Hinds), Avner conducts a worldwide operation, targeting 11 individuals. As the assassinations pile up, Avner begins to doubt the morality of his actions.
THE CAST – Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciarán Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz, Hanns Zischler & Geoffrey Rush
THE TEAM – Steven Spielberg (Director), Eric Roth & Tony Kushner (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 163 Minutes
Of all the politically-minded films made in the wake of 9/11 and the uncertainty of the Bush years, none may have aged quite so well as Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.” Not only did the film mark the first collaboration between Spielberg and playwright Tony Kushner, one of the most fruitful artistic collaborations of the 2010s, but it remains one of the most clear-eyed treatments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has increasingly had an effect on global politics in the years since the film’s release in 2005. In telling the story of Israel’s retaliation against the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes, Spielberg and co-screenwriters Kushner and Eric Roth give nearly equal weight to the distress felt by the families of both the Israeli victims and the militant Palestinians.
They show with equal horror the violence inflicted upon the Israelis in Munich and the retaliatory violence carried out by Mossad agents against those responsible, asking what could possibly end this horrific cycle of violence that continues to this day. Incredibly dark subject matter for the usually humanist Spielberg, but the populist director often thrives when going darker (“A.I.,” “Minority Report,” and “Schindler’s List,” to name a few), and “Munich” is in some ways no exception. However, the film’s indulgent length and deliberate pacing – combined with a remote, uncharismatic lead – can make it a slog to get through despite some thrilling set pieces that remain some of the best-directed sequences in Spielberg’s career.
The film is adapted from George Jones’s book “Vengeance,” which was mainly sourced by one man: Yuval Aviv. The veracity of Aviv’s story has been contradicted by many officials and former Mossad agents involved with the operation, mainly because a large number of people around the globe worked on it, not just the singular team Aviv worked with. What is undeniably true, however, is that after Israel bombed ten PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon as retaliation, West Germany gave into terrorist demands to release three of the perpetrators of the Olympic attack. This convinced Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen), initially ambivalent about the idea of a wide-ranging assassination operation, to fully support it as long as collateral damage was kept to a minimum and the Israeli government could have plausible deniability. Thus, the film’s Aviv stand-in, Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), gets brought on board, with the gruff Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush) as his handler. Kaufman, a Mossad agent of Jewish descent, gets set up with a small team who barely know each other and barely have experience in the field. This team consists of former Israeli soldier and cleaner Carl (Ciarán Hinds), German antiques dealer and document forger Hans (Hanns Zischler), Belgian toy-and-bomb-maker Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), and South African driver Steve (Daniel Craig).
In order to find the assassins from Munich, Kaufman works with a French information broker named Louis (Mathieu Amalric). Still, neither he nor his teammates seem to fully grasp how much danger this puts them in until they arrive at a safe house recommended by Louis, only to find that he has sent a group of PLO agents there at the same time. Throughout the film, the Mossad team debates the ethics of their mission in between kills, but everything comes to a head here, as they have to pretend to be working for different agencies and make nice with their surprise houseguests for a night. Kaufman’s conversation with their ostensible leader about the Palestinians’ plans and hopes for the future brilliantly lays out both sides’ arguments in stark terms: It’s true that the Palestinians can’t take back land that was never technically a Palestinian state anyway, but they have the numbers to keep the fight going for generations. Their killing of Jews will only mark them as animals, but it will bring to light how the Israelis have turned them into animals by denying them basic rights in their own homeland. Their ancestral lands may not be much, but it’s theirs, and why should they have to give it up when they didn’t do anything?
Nearly two decades later, the dialogue rings just as true, if not even truer than it did back when the film was released. The conversations the Mossad agents have among themselves reflect conversations Americans have had numerous times over in the intervening years, giving those moments even more impact now than ever before. It’s some of the most compelling work of both Roth and Kushner’s careers, performed by a cast of dedicated character actors who know how to make the dialogue sing – with one significant exception. While his castmates all wring some personality out of the screenplay, making every second of screen time impactful, Bana just doesn’t have the juice to lead the film. His charisma pales in comparison to Craig’s, and he lacks Hinds’s sly wit, Zischler’s sense of gravitas, and Kassovitz’s live-wire energy. His focused intensity reaches its zenith in the film’s last act, when the mission is over, and Kaufman has to deal with the aftermath of what he’s done, but for most of the film, he’s a pretty blank slate, giving no emotion either vocally or physically.
Building a film like this around such a black hole would sink most directors, but not Spielberg. He responds by crafting each assassination sequence masterfully, ratcheting up the tension to unbearable levels with the aid of John Williams’s muscular score and showcasing some shocking violence. The dark, deep shadows of Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography mark the film as a product of the early 2000s, but the camera movement, which effectively incorporates a lot of ‘70s-style zooms, is the real takeaway, creating some of the most elegant images of this pair’s many collaborations together. An early sequence involving a remote-controlled bomb in a phone is one of the most heart-stoppingly thrilling in Spielberg’s career – a perfect use of every element in his cinematic toolkit.
Whatever cinematic alchemy allowed him to achieve such thrilling action sequences, however, didn’t translate to the film’s overall pacing, which lurches forward with each assassination but grinds to a halt in between. The sheer amount of plot overwhelms everything else, and since the audience isn’t let in on too many details of each assassination attempt, they all blur together a bit after the fact. The conversations between the characters have compelling moments, but at a certain point, it all starts to feel a bit circular, like the film keeps hitting the same beats over and over again. This isn’t without purpose – Kaufman’s character arc is about him slowly waking up to how numb he was about killing other human beings – but it can be agonizing to watch in a way that doesn’t feel purposeful.
Any film nearing the two-and-three-quarter-hour mark needs consistent pacing and forward momentum to ensure audience engagement, and “Munich” unfortunately falls down on that front. Between that and Bana’s charisma void, the film is missing too much of vital importance to rank in the top tier of Spielberg’s enviable filmography; however, the fact that it mostly works despite that is a testament to just how talented a director he is.
