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Munich review
:. Director: Steven Spielberg
:. Starring: Eric Bana, Daniel Craig
:. Running Time: 2:10
:. Year: 2006
:. Country: USA
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In Steven Spielberg's Munich, an entertaining mess with a good heart, we follow Avner (Eric Bana - Hulk, Chopper) and his team—including Daniel Craig (Casino Royale, Layer Cake) & Mathieu Kassovitz (Hate, Amelie)—as they track down the terrorists responsible for the Munich Olympics massacre.
The film based on George Jonas' book, Vengeance, has stirred political controversy, but I won't venture there because of my ignorance in that field. What matters to me is the film itself, which is way too flawed to be considered a good film even though the ensemble is quite absorbing, supported by a strong cast and, most importantly, features a message of reconciliation for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Munich has definitely a paranoid cold war vibe and is reminiscent of 70's films featuring the likes of Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Charles Bronson. We get to travel to exotic locations in Europe while the team assassinates a series of bad guys, without really knowing if they're guilty or not. After a while the succession of hits starts bores and we even get confronted with a Scarface-like dilemma regarding kids as casualties. More interesting is what happens behind the scenes, the various bargains for information with a French family running an intelligence business, as well as the few encounters that Avner has with some of his victims, realizing that after all, they're just as human as he is.
As a European, the first annoying thing I noticed about Munich, and I'm not sure if we owe that to the set designer or the filmmaker, is its postcard-like representation of Europe, which recycles the most enduring clichés about the "old world". When the film is set in Paris, we discover Avner with his friends, wearing berets and carrying the paper Le Monde around a city plastered with posters of French star Jean-Paul Belmondo's films. Avner gets to go to a market located on a bridge at the bottom of the Eiffel tower, and later on even shares cooking anecdotes with the patriarch of the French family that has been feeding him information. It didn't take long before I felt like I had been transported in the middle of Amelie and just as I was thinking that the only thing missing was a Citroen DS, along it came. This wasn't only in Paris, as when they go to Amsterdam, they get to ride bicycles and kill a hitwoman with a bicycle pump gun—something I believe to have already seen in another movie—maybe one of the Bourne entries.
But most importantly, the main issue in Munich is that by using Avner as a metaphor for Israel's pain and desire for vengeance, he creates a dysfunctional character who, for no logical reason, is haunted by the Munich massacre—his dreams and trauma are used by the director as a vehicle to convey flashbacks. It is no secret that Spielberg has had an issue with sex, always absent in his films, and for the first time he treats it onscreen. The result is so awkward that it looks like the work of a teenager trying to talk about sex with his parents.
The movie starts with Avner having sex with his pregnant wife—a symbol of sex as a tool of procreation—and then follows with a couple of lethal sexual encounters purposely featuring full-frontal male and female nudity. At this moment, we get the feeling that Spielberg now assimilates sex and pleasure with death, which is confirmed in the end, in probably the most grotesque scene of this picture, when Avner has an orgasm while thinking about the execution of the Israeli athletes. I'm not sure what Spielberg's message about sex is, from birth to death, and what it has to do with a film dealing with politics and vengeance, but it certainly hurts the credibility of his work and premise.
Fred Thom
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