15, 165mins
Three remarkable films crafted around historical acts of violence illustrate cinema’s unrivalled power to milk entertainment from topical fears. Whether these films are a help or a hindrance is another matter entirely.
If Munich is Steven Spielberg’s “prayer for peace” we might as well pack our lunchboxes and set sail for the nearest desert island. His exhausting thriller tries to plant a white flag between Israel and Palestine by revisiting one of the ugliest dogfights in their toxic history. On September 5, 1972, an Arab terrorist group kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes and coaches in the Olympic Village at the Munich Games. Less than 24 hours later the hostages were dead.
A dashing intelligence officer, Avner (Eric Bana), is invited over tea and cakes to assassinate the authors of the atrocity. “We have to show them we’re strong,” croaks Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister, before ambling upstairs for a nap.
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Avner is forced to leave his pregnant wife, bury his identity, zig-zag around the globe, and knock off 11 targets identified by Geoffrey Rush’s Mossad mastermind. The secrecy is as unnerving as the stake-outs. The justice is as visceral as the carnage. Victims are blown to smithereens by exploding television sets, dynamite in hotel beds and booby-trapped telephones.
There’s something almost comically period about Avner’s avengers. Daniel Craig’s blunt South African is the hired muscle. He poses and swaggers like a young Paul Newman. Mathieu Kassovitz is the potty inventor who can never get the ingredients right for his dodgy homemade bombs. And Ciarán Hinds “cleans up” after them like Lurch.
Operation Wrath of God has never been formally acknowledged by Israel, and I doubt anyone will be inspired to hold up their hands after this “exposé”. Yet Spielberg uses his considerable skills to create an alarming sense of authenticity. The details are immaculate: the trendy flared trousers, the grainy film stock, even the way the poodles are shaved in Paris.
The drama is criss-crossed with ethical trip wires. Avner fails to press the fatal button on one occasion when a young child wanders into range. The wisdom of the mission instantly buckles when the cast start questioning the short-term point. The killers know nothing about their respectable-looking victims, or whether eliminating them will do the slightest bit of good. Their only human contact is a sinister French Mafia family which sells the addresses of targets for bricks of cash.
Inevitably, the hunters become the hunted. There’s a farcical interlude when the Israeli lads are accidentally billeted in the same safe house as a Palestinian outfit. A professional truce reveals the unstunning fact that they are driven by exactly the same demons.
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But Eric Bana’s haunted Avner has as much hope of winkling a deep point from this encounter as squeezing water from a stone. “You did what you did because you had to feed your family,” says the French Godfather, carefully pruning his grapes.
Munich was shot hot on the heels of Spielberg’s interplanetary fantasy The War of the Worlds. Frankly, there’s not much to choose between Mossad and the Martians. And there’s something worryingly manipulative about a film that tries to make us feel guilty about the screamingly obvious. The health warning in Munich (and arguably on Mars) is that revenge turns patriots into psychopathic extremists. The only cure is to break the cycle. And if that’s the only novel revelation I’m on the next flying saucer out.