Munich

Overlong, ponderous, and erratic, Munich is easily the most ineffective movie of Steven Spielberg’s career and only cements the feeling that the director is now more interested in churning out “important” films than in entertaining his audience. Though well acted and impeccably shot, the movie remains curiously uninvolving throughout its ridiculously bloated 164-minute running time. Based on the true story, Munich follows five Israeli assassins, led by Eric Bana’s Avner, tasked with hunting down and executing 11 Palestinians believed to have planned the massacre of Jewish athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. While there are plenty of individually compelling moments here, particularly the sequence in which Avner and company come awfully close to blowing up a little girl, the distinct lack of dramatic tension effectively prevents the viewer from wholeheartedly embracing any of the central characters or their cause. (This is despite the uniformly superb performances, with Bana a clear standout.) Spielberg’s expectedly heavy-handed approach is exacerbated by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth’s screenplay, which is painfully unsubtle and filled to the brim with poetic but thoroughly inauthentic instances of dialogue. The final straw comes towards the end with a laughably overwrought sequence in which Spielberg cuts between Avner and his wife having sex with footage of the Jewish athletes being murdered, as the director clumsily hammers home the extraordinarily obvious point that Avner’s psyche has been damaged by the killings. The majority of Munich is similarly substandard, and it’s difficult to imagine just what Spielberg was hoping to accomplish with this disastrously inept piece of work.

*1/2 out of ****

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