15 out of 18 people found the following review helpful:
A whimper, not a bang.
Daniel Shires from London,
24th October, 2006
Munich is a curiously uninvolving affair, and for my money by far the weakest Spielberg non-blockbuster movie that he's done. Bana stars as a Mossad agent who is taken 'off the books' after the dreadful Munich Olympics massacre of the Israeli team by Black September, purely to meet revenge on the perpetrators of what was a quite appalling crime. With direct approval from Golda Meir and with a team of 4 specialists, it's Bana's job to find and kill 11 people connected to the Munich atrocity. So far, so intriguing. But it's Spielbergs absolute utter refusal to be anything less than fully even handed that scuppers any of the films dramatic tension. It's simply a repetitive structure of Bana having someone killed, feeling awful regret about it (tempered by a flashback to the Munich siege, which he wasn't even involved with, to motivate him) finding the next person, killing them, feeling bad about it, finding the next person... well, you get the picture. Even a late starter subplot, where it looks like the person selling information to Bana may well have sold information about him to the Palestinians fails to ignite any real interest. And the exposition - good lord, it's heavy on the exposition. About three quarters of the way through there's a speech from one of the team outlining pretty much every single thing that's happened to that point, just in case you weren't paying attention/had dropped off at some point. It's like Miss Hoolie has entered the gangs hideout and asked 'What's the story in Balamory?' The finale of the film also has an absolutely ludicrous sex scene intercut with a final Munich flashback that I was simply laughing at by that point. Bana's climax involves so much sweat flying off him it's like he's been submerged in a pool and is coming up for air. In the end, it's a film which is trying so hard to say a lot, it ends up saying absolutely nothing - nothing about the Middle East conflict, nothing about the actions of both Palestine and Israel, nothing even about the nature of revenge and what it can do to someone. It merely says that the Munich atrocity was an awful thing, and that state sponsored killing is an awful thing as well - both of which I pretty much knew before I put the DVD into the machine. Hugely disappointing.
Read all highest rated reviews
