Munich

Ever since his performance in Chopper blew me away I’ve been a big fan of Eric Bana. I’ve pretty much seen everything he’s done since then, (which admittedly isn’t all that much) even the Australian film The Nugget. He has, however, not done anything as powerful as his film debut.

Munich doesn’t change that. Based on the events in the aftermath of the 1972 Olympic Games Munich Massacre, Munich doesn’t quite hit the spot. Kevin MacDonald’s brilliant Oscar winning documentary One Day in September told the story of the hostage taking, botched rescue attempts and subsequent slaughter of 11 Israeli athletes. Munich promises to tell us of Mossad’s secret mission to exterminate those they thought responsible for the hostage taking.

The mission, codenamed Operation Wrath of God (though that term never features in the film) is lead by Bana’s Avner, a former bodyguard now in charge of his own team of Field Operatives.

I think Spielberg is an outstanding filmmaker. He’s possibly the greatest director working at the moment. As a storyteller he’s flawed. He tends to put across his points in a tyrannical fashion. The scene that most grated for me was Bana’s character struggling to cope with normal life with his mind flashing back to the massacre of the athletes. However the character has no memory of this as he wasn’t there and although he could have known what happened hardly seems the overwhelming image for the trauma he’s been through. This all happens during a sex scene which makes it even more excruciating.

It seemed more like a device to hammer home a point. Avner’s worries and doubts would have centred on the people he killed himself as that is where his conscience would lie. It’s odd for me that the characters accepted the roles of assassins easily enough and only later started to question if what they were doing was right and if they were killing the correct people. Of course another criticism that has been levelled at the film is that the Mossad assassins were ruthless killers with no conscience who wouldn’t have stopped to consider the outcome of their actions.

The film certainly doesn’t show that the mission was a good idea. It clearly indicates that the revenge mission ultimately brought about many, many more deaths and the increase in terrorist ranks.

Factually of course it misses its mark here and there. The main criticism this article offers is that the film misses out the blunder which ultimately ended the mission. The Lillehammer affair saw a hurriedly assembled Mossad hit team murder a Moroccan waiter mistaking him for Ali Hassan Salameh, their number one target.

Spielberg’s film can get around this omission by the fact that it falls out with the period covered by the movie and by the fact that it’s made clear that Avner’s team were not the only ones sent out to kill.

As for the film itself, Bana is good, though doesn’t really have many big moments, what he does is all small and perhaps his performance is all the better for it. Geoffrey Rush is superb as his handler and pretty much steals every scene he’s in. Ciaran Hinds, (who began his stage career at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre as the rear end of a horse in the production of Cinderella, according to the imdb) is also a stand out as Carl, the group’s ‘cleaner’.

It’s worth going to see but I really felt it was missing something. All in it gets 3 Tom stars.