People are fragile things,
     You should know by now.
     Be careful what you put them through.

        Editors, 'Munich'







After all the hype and controversy, it's quite a pleasant surprise that Munich should turn out to be, in effect, Ronin with a politics A-level. As in John Frankenheimer's 1999 guilty pleasure, we follow a crack team of 'experts' around Europe as they perpetrate a series of violent exploits in pursuit of a hazardous mission: Daniel Craig roughly equivalent to Sean Bean (except he isn't exposed as a fake); the 'Stellan Skarsgard' role of enigmatic older gent here split between Hanns Zischler and Ciaran Hinds; and the highlight of both pictures comes courtesy of an extended, wonderfully quiet cameo from Michel Lonsdale.

In Munich Lonsdale - looking like the world's oldest puppy - is the genial 'Papa' whose shadowy French organisation provides the team with vital information, but whose own loyalties remain mysterious. This team - as most readers will already know - is sent by the Israeli government to exact revenge for the Black September attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, during which eleven of that nation's athletes were murdered. The unit is led by Avner (Eric Bana), a former bodyguard of Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen), who develops increasing moral qualms as him and his boys make their way through the list of eleven prominent PLO-connected targets.

These qualms are accompanied by a series of intense flashbacks - but not to the assassinations which seem to cause Avner his crisis of morality. Instead Avner 'flashes back' to the events at Munich: events he did not personally witness. This seems an odd decision from scriptwriters Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and Eric Roth (The Insider). And director Spielberg makes it seem even odder with the overemphatic, even histrionic way he presents Avner's visions - especially the last one, which occurs during coitus, and in which his Brooklyn bedroom appears to be illuminated by the frenetic flashing lights of Munich airport.

Spielberg is clearly energised by this project, but can't overcome the fundamental old-fashionedness of his technique: cliched hand-held camerawork and distractingly inconsistent cinematography (all glowingly fuzzy one minute; all saturated and gritty the next) make for unfortunate bedfellows. John Williams' score is pleasingly subdued - a plus, even if there is quite a heavy debt to the kind of music familiar from Michael Mann pictures.

Munich is a big, long, portentous picture at 164 minutes: a good half-hour too long, which you really feel thanks to the broken-backed structure in which the team score hit after hit until all of a sudden they start falling like nine-pins. Spielberg is most comfortable when he's able to deliver a pulsating, continent-hopping thriller in the slick early-seventies style of Alastair MacLean adaptations and the like. But every time we get a decent bit of gunplay or explosive pyrotechnics we then have to listen as the characters debate the rights and wrongs of what they're doing.

Only once, however, does the film really conveince in terms of troubling moral ambiguity: namely a pivotal episode involving a slinky Dutch assassin (Marie-Jose Croze). Instead, the characters go through the motions of conscience-crisis, but we don't get enough background or depth to make much of it stick. This is perhaps why Lonsdale makes such an impact - he brings his own depth and background to every line he speaks, whereas the main players need to get it all from the script, and find only words on a page.

Neil Young
26th January, 2005

MUNICH : [6/10] : USA 2005 : Steven SPIELBERG : 164 mins (BBFC timing)
seen at Odeon cinema, Newcastle (UK), 23rd January 2006 - press show