Munich

I am currently not caring much about Munich, Steven Spielberg's incredibly quickly done film about the events that followed the kidnap and murder on the Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympics by the Palestinians. The movie is about revenge, political revenge, and it's also about morality, once the characters we follow start questioning their actions. What the movie also does is to reflect the current political state of the world, and it's been also discussed the fact that Spielberg is Jewish, making a film about Jews against Palestinians. Once you see the movie you can see that he doesn't take sides, he's against both and he defends both. The screenplay, written by Tony Kushner (Angels in America) with some first drafts by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Insider, Ali), based on George Jonas' book Vengeance, is very smart about that. The problem with all of that is I that I want to see a movie, and much like Good Night and Good Luck, The Constant Gardener or Syriana, I really don't care about the political messages the movie wants to give me, what I want is a movie, with good characters and a good story, it's even better if I really get into it emotionally. That happened to me with Munich, but the it lost me, especially at the 2 hour mark, when the movie should've ended instead of changing shifts for some uninteresting 45 more minutes.

After the aforementioned beginning at the Olympics, we jump to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (played Lynn Cohen) who says, "Forget peace for now", and forms a group of revenge seeking assassins who must work like undercover terrorists and travel all through Europe searching and killing the 11 people (mostly by bombing their rooms, so that it makes noise, literally and non) who are being held responsible for Munich. Living everything behind, they sign a contract that tells them they do not exist anymore, and can't contact anybody because nobody knows who they are anymore. They will be contacted only by a man named Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), who pays them and asks them for reports every now and then.
The group is led by Avner (Eric Bana), a former bodyguard of the Prime Minister, with a hero father he never lived up to. He's has a pregnant wife at the movie. Then we have getaway driver Steve (Daniel Craig), document forger Hans (Hanns Zischler), toy maker turned bomb maker Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz) and Carl (Ciaran Hinds), the cleanup man. None of them are actually killers by the way, but they will be. Once they start looking for their targets, Avner meets and kind of befriends (though never truly trusting) Louis (Mathieu Amalric), a French man who knows where to find everybody in exchange for some serious amounts of money. He's helps them because he thinks they are not working for the government which he has no intention to help, but he thinks that this is a personal vendetta, and family he does care about.

The whole second hour or so of the movie is about the killings, at times well perpetrated, and at other times with many problems, some even comical, because the bombs can't seem to work as well as they expect. Still, whenever they work, it makes for terrific scenes of realistic brutality. This also works amazingly well at the beginning of the movie when the athletes are killed. Spielberg uses actual footage of the TV stations transmitting live from Munich, and then he creates the inside happenings with brilliant and horrific results.
The acting in the movie is worth nothing, though not as good as a whole as I was expecting. Bana is good, especially in the scenes with his family, but I never got really connected to his feelings during the attacks, mostly the script's fault. Daniel Craig is ok, but his character is really underused, and they really didn't need a big name for the part. The best performance of the movie is that by Ciaran Hinds. Really strong work, eating every scene and line he has up.

The final act is what I really didn't like, as the team (or what's left of it) is dissolved after an attempt to kill the biggest name in their list. The movie then focuses on Avner (and forgets about the rest) and the state of paranoia he's set in after returning to his family. Every turn he makes he thinks someone is after him, maybe with reason, maybe not. And so he plays a lot against Ephraim in a morality battle discussing whether or not what they did was worth something, since even worse people soon replaced the people they killed. And these same discussions were held inside the team before, so I felt that this whole climax didn't work at all, and should've been cut, or even better, changed so that Bana would've had to go on a personal revenge, though that is not what's in the book so I guess that was not doable.

The movie is technically perfect, with an excellent 70s looking cinematography by Janusz Kaminski. The score by John Williams though, didn't quite work for me.
And so the movie works great during the beginning, and then falls flat at the end, not knowing what to do to be a great movie, and opting to try and be relevant in today's world. It succeeds in that, but the problem is that with so many important political movies out this year, why should I care for this one in particular? And so I don't, again (just like with Syriana) preferring Paradise Now, the Palestinian movie about suicide bombers questioning their methods since it’s going to keep happening over and over again and never stop. As a film, with good but not excellent acting, and an emotional attachment that was just not there, Munich, and Spielberg, did not impress me, and it would need some big parts of it getting cut to do it.