Munich

RATED: R for strong graphic violence, some sexual content, nudity and language.
RUNNING TIME: 167 MINUTES
STARS: Eric Bana (Avner), Daniel Craig (Steve), Ciaran Hinds (Carl), Hanns Zischler (Hans), Geoffrey Rush (Ephraim), Mathieu Amalric (Louis).
PLOT: Set in the aftermath of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, Munich follows the secret plot of Israel to exact revenge on the Arab men who had a hand in plotting the assassinations.

Gord Burt 4.5 Stars

Director Steven Spielberg’s spectacularly gripping and unsettling new thriller is the least commercial, most sombrely heartfelt movie ever made by cinema’s most commercially successful filmmaker. He did, after, all give us Jaws and Jurassic Park, but Munich has more in common with Schindler’s List.

Munich begins with an event that shook the world, and that arguably remade it: the September 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by a Palestinian terrorist group called Black September. A long and harrowing re-enactment brings the whole sordid and unfortunate spectacle back to life, including the infuriating ease with which the terrorists pulled it off and the pathetic, disorganized German response. To add authenticity to the movie, grainy film stock, vintage news footage, still photos and radio broadcasts of the hostage crisis are used, which enhances the movie and sends the viewer back in time.

Surprisingly, the Olympic massacre gets relatively little screen time as the film mostly concerns the aftermath of the terrifying murders and follows the efforts of a secret team of five Israelis assigned to track down and kill 11 Palestinians suspected of planning the Munich attack. Munich follows the assassination team’s long campaign, as they track the Black September terrorists from one European city to another. The results of this campaign are verifiable by historical fact; one man was killed by a bomb in his telephone and another by a booby-trapped mattress, but Israel has kept the details of that mission secret ever since, and the movie, by necessity, fuses fact and speculation.

While Munich never explicitly questions the validity of Israel’s right to assassinate the Palestinians, it also never wavers from showing the devilish effects of what the campaign does to the men who wage it. We can’t predict what’s going to happen any more than they can.
This is a film that leads you in loops without feeding you the answers. Just as you start to wonder about the necessity of this mission, Spielberg cuts back to the Olympics massacre which reinforces the decision. Then, just as you may be getting too comfortable with it, he introduces a Palestinian character to argue with Avner about the plight of the Arab people. There’s no action without reaction, no cause without effect, no easy answers after the pulling of a trigger or the refusal to pull it.

Erin Harde 4.5 Stars

For those that were around to watch the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Steven Spielberg’s latest masterpiece will shake the dust off those memories and violently bring them back into public consciousness with a fiery vengeance. The hurt and anguish so many felt when innocent Israeli athletes were slaughtered in the village and at the airport is renewed in Munich, but the movie goes beyond the pain of those deaths and seeks revenge upon the Arabs who orchestrated and carried out those assassinations.

Perhaps shamefully, it provides a glorious sense of satisfaction that Israeli sympathizers were denied at the time because nobody knew about the plot to fight back. Indeed, Spielberg stirs the audience’s anger so quickly that all of the hits on the assassins seem justified; it’s not hard to imagine how Avner could so easily have accepted his mission to kill all those men without question. Spielberg can’t bring himself to be fair; he’s not interested in the Arab side of the story only that of the Jews, and it’s hard not to be swept up in his rage.

Eric Bana is amazing as the tortured Avner, which is surprising given his performance in Hulk. He is heroic in his devotion to his country, his people and the task at hand. Moreover, people are not disposable to him. He has his targets, and risks everything to make there aren’t civilian casualties. For every man he must kill, there is a gut-wrenching scene in which we must wait and sweat it out with him, and every murder has its tense moments whether it’s an unaccounted for daughter answering the phone bomb, or a bomb that blows up most of a hotel instead of one room.

Bana is also flanked by high-calibre actors, all of whom bring something special to Munich be it humour, compassion or cold, hard reason. Mathieu Amalric’s Louis stands out as the most intriguing of the bunch. Avner pays him big bucks for information, but Louis likes to toy with the group, placing them in dangerous situations that could be deemed sociology experiments.
Munich feeds our hatred and vengeance, and it can hardly end on a happy note, given the current climate in the Middle East. Spielberg’s not so gentle reminder of that slaps us in the face, as it does Avner who is surely destined to feel the blood of both Israelis and Arabs on his hands for the rest of his life.