Thumbs up but be warned it is very violent and an emotionally draining movie to watch.
In 1972, Palestinian terrorists took Israeli athletes as hostages during the Olympic Games in Munich. German commandos attempted a hostage rescue at the airport but all the hostages and terrorists were killed.
The film has us see the hostage drama unfolding on ABC News by having us watch as the people of the time watch on television. I was old enough to have seen it on television so it was a bit spooky to see the footage again.
The story then moves into the inner circle of the Israeli government where they decided that covert teams would be sent to assasinate individuals Israeli intelligence identified as being part of the Munich hostage plot.
Lynn Cohen as Prime Minister Goldia Mier discussing the plans to find and kill the terrorist planners.
Eric Bana stars as Avner who is assigned leadership of one of the teams. He is "taken off the books" of the Israeli government and given access to funds in Swiss banks.
Eric Bana, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ciaran Hinds, Hanns Zischler and Daniel Craig star as the hit team the film follows.
The film then follows a pattern of the group planning the killings, the actual hit where something inevitably goes awry and then post-mortem where practical problems and moral doubts are discussed.
As an action film, Spielberg has a Hitchcock-like ability to keep you on the edge with camera angles and inpeccible timing. The killing set pieces are gritty, potent and stomach turning to watch.
As a film of reflection, the strongest message that comes across is the toll such missions take on decent people like Bana's Avner. It is a classic tale of how does one fight evil without becoming evil in the process?
The geopolitical discussions that take place here and there from the mouths of various team members and people they meet are fairly predictable. If anything, at times, it come across with a little too much moral equivalence.
One wonders to what degree the hunt for Al-Qaeda and other terrorists looks like what happens in this movie. In the news these days, we hear about some terrorist leader killed by Predator drone or in a raid of a hideout. What we aren't told is how the information is obtained to know where to send the drones and which places to raid. The film shows that getting that kind of information involves giving money and trusting unsavory people of unclear loyalties.
A very hard movie to watch and emotionally draining but effective.
I gave the film 2.5 stars out of 4. It could have gotten 3 stars but I think Spielberg didn't use effectively the scenes he shot recreating the Munich hostage taking and the failed German commando rescue. He broke those scenes up into flashbacks and dream sequences. I think that muddled the event that precipitated the premise of the story of the film. If the film led off with the terrorist plot, it would have provided a full force "punch in the face" such that the events that followed would be in better context.
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