Review: Munich (2005) Directed by Steven Spielberg and Starring Eric Bana

At well over two and a half hours, sense would tell us that Munich is too long. Because Steven Spielberg directs it, sense would also tell us we should expect to be disappointed, for Munich surely will not rise to the level of Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan. And since the film covers the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist assassinations of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches, we may also assume the film will fall into political agitprop.

But as he has been doing throughout his career, Spielberg exceeds expectations. If he is not a pure artist of the highest caliber, no one can deny him among the greatest filmmakers. In Munich, he takes on an epic story: the Israeli assassination squad formed to kill the organizers of the Olympics massacre. Eric Bana plays Avner, who bears the paranoia that comes from killing. The film is a political thriller with suspenseful scenes coming at a staccato rate.

Instead of experienced assassins, the squad is comprised of five workaday heroes who find their loyalty to their mission tested. They have a vengeance mission and an unlimited budget to travel the world and kill men whose names are on a list provided by a shadowy French syndicate. Are the targets even guilty? Will the squad's names and whereabouts be sold to the highest bidder? Who is involved-KGB, CIA, MI6, Mossad? These plot twists are typical of the spy genre, but Munich is based on real events.

The film is strong with its European urban settings: London, Rome, Paris, Munich. (Not all scenes might have been shot on location, but the sets are impressive nonetheless.) The acting is strong, although the casting perhaps belies a lack of knowledge about European culture on the part of director and producers. The cinematography is best in the cinema verite style used to recreate the Olympics events. Munich is very watchable in a James Bond-movie kind of way -- it's successful as a straightforward hit man flick, but Spielberg is trying for more than this.

The film is not perfectly executed. The assassins' reservations about their actions-"Why not charge the terrorists with breaking the law?"-seem tacked-on. The film is insistently dark and could use more humor to lighten tension, a scene of dueling Arab and Western music notwithstanding. Avner's (Eric Bana) descent into paranoia comes with excessive makeup. Some scenes are there to tell the "real events" aspect of the story instead of form the viewer's movie experience. As with Spielberg's other works, the emphasis is the in-movie experience instead of artistic complexity that may take days to understand.

It's difficult to hold much against Spielberg, who has added so much to historical understanding through film. As he says in the introduction to Munich, his job as a filmmaker is not to make a political statement, but to "find the humanity" of events through character. In that, Munich largely succeeds. Brilliant as Spielberg's films are in terms of production value, there seems to be something significant blocking his ability tell a truly human story. Is it that he wants his films to be successful monetarily? Is it his use of sentimentality? I think it's something simpler-Spielberg wants us to identify with his characters, he wants to shape our experience of film, and this is what holds his films back artistically. His films are not there as singular statements, take it or leave it. In a word, he overreaches. It's a vague and miniscule lack of storytelling confidence, but nonetheless apparent.

In the end, we should appreciate Spielberg for what he has done for film; there was a time in the 1970s when it appeared that film itself may no longer be a viable business; Jaws changed that. Munich is another Spielberg project which elevates our imagination and satisfies us at the end of the movie, but which disappoints in the days following. A universal human story is self-evident in its catharsis; it's not for the director to decide how the viewer feels.