Munich: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

The new Steven Spielberg thriller, "Munich," cuts a bloody swath of revenge that literally, in several scenes, finds its characters either riddled with bullets, soaked in blood, blown out of their hotel rooms, covered in body parts, or spinning from ceiling fans-- sometimes all at once.

Shock cinema? Absolutely, but with a story and with a point.

The film deals (and opens) with the abduction of the 11 Israeli Olympians at the 1972 Munich games, who were murdered at the hands of a group of Palestinian extremists who called themselves Black September.

Cut to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen, perfect), who begins a secret campaign that finds her hiring one of her former Mossad agents and bodyguards, Avner Kauffman (Eric Bana), to lead four other Jews (Daniel Craig, Mathieu Kassovitz, Hanns Zischler, Ciaran Hinds) in an effort to execute the men who executed their men. It's a tit-for-tat revenge scheme, with Spielberg literally spanning the globe as these men score their hits in a rush of violence that only serves to spawn more violence.

Geoffrey Rush is Ephraim, the man to whom Avner must answer, though there are conflicts that run deep between them, so their relationship becomes increasingly tense as the bloodshed mounts and the killings become risky--some might even say out of hand.

Mathieu Amalric is Avner's French connection, a slippery creep who along with his cunning father, Papa (Michael Lonsdale), can get the information Avner needs to track down those he must kill. Whether he can trust these men is the question Avner must constantly face, with the worry that he can't gradually pushing him to the edge.

As written by Tony Kushner and Erich Roth from the book "Vengeance" by George Jonas, "Munich" is pure international intrigue, with Spielberg courting a sophisticated new style that eschews sentiment and schmaltz while tipping his hat to a few notable directors, particularly Hitchcock in the highly stylized way he stages each assassination, and Coppola in a key outdoor dining scene inspired by "The Godfather."

Joining the creative shakeup is John Williams, who also successfully stretches here, with his usual overbearing style muted in favor of a subtle score that proves a fine complement to the movie.

Given the subject and the politics at hand, the film is hardly without its controversy, particularly since its sourcebook has been repeatedly questioned (and defended) for its accuracy. As a piece of filmmaking, what makes the movie feel at once lived in and surreal are the small touches Spielberg laces throughout. Whether it's the way Avner, a would-be chef, cooks elaborate meals for his men, or the way one character, naked and shot twice in the chest, manages to find her way to her cat and hug it a last time before dying, "Munich" never loses its romantic idea of what humanity should be in spite of the inhumanity it breeds.

It's this internal struggle within Spielberg, a humanist and an idealist, that keeps him from making a defining political statement on the matters at hand. In his effort to view each side of the conflict fairly, he doesn't take a side, which leaves his film caught somewhere in the middle.

This isn't a mark against the movie. In fact, given the murky complications of war, it seems about right. In the end, that "Munich" is built around the timely questions of who wins in revenge when death is a mainstay on both sides of the battle, turns out to be comment enough.

Grade: A-