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Murder takes its toll in 'Munich'

In some ways, "Munich" is its own worst enemy.

The bare, brutal, heart-rending facts of what happened at the Munich Olympics in 1972, when Palestinian terrorists massacred 11 Israeli athletes, continually upstage the semi-fictional account of the tragedy's vengeful aftermath shown us by director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner.

Universal Pictures 'Munich' B The verdict: Though too long and tending toward preachiness, this is an important movie, made with great skill and greater sorrow. Director: Steven Spielberg Starring: Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ayelet July Zurer Release date: Dec. 23, 2005 Rating: R for strong graphic violence, some sexual content, nudity and language. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'Munich'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

The picture revisits the unspeakable incident repeatedly, sometimes as actual news footage, other times as reenactments of what may have gone on inside the athletes' rooms or on the airport runway where everything fell apart. In one bit of virtuoso filmmaking, Spielberg films a terrorist in a ski mask heading out to the balcony and then cuts to the infamous real-life image of him out there, machine gun in hand.

The movie proper, so to speak, begins at a top-secret meeting where Israel's prime minister, Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen), gravely weighs her options. "There are dead Jews in Germany and the rest of the world is playing games," she grimly notes of the ongoing Olympic competitions, before deciding to go the eye-for-an-eye route.

Sometimes, she reasons, a nation's moral values must be considered within a larger context.

Avner (Eric Bana), an Israeli intelligence agent with a cute wife and a kid on the way, is selected to lead a five-man team whose orders are to track down and assassinate the men thought to have planned the Munich attack. As Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), Avner's sole contact with the Israeli government, says, the five are "officially unofficial" — meaning, as far as Israel is concerned, they don't exist.

So, "unofficially," Bana and his hand-picked team globetrot Europe, knocking off names on their list. As they do so, they become more like the men they're hunting Ñ cold-blooded, single-minded, inured to any harm that could befall family members of their prey or innocent bystanders. And they're not even absolutely sure the men they're killing are guilty (still a question mark, according to the movie).

Spielberg and Kushner ("Angels in America") make the point that murder, no matter how justifiable, takes its toll. Avner, who's the only one we really get to know (one of the movie's weaknesses), is transformed from an moral, ordinary man to a haunted figure no longer certain of himself or the righteousness of his mission.

Mission being the operative word here: "Munich" sometimes comes off like a very long "Mission Impossible." Not the high-tech Tom Cruise movies, but the old TV show with each member assigned a specialty. Nobody dons a fake beard and silly accent a la Martin Landau, but the five operatives do have their areas of expertise. Daniel Craig (our new 007) is the gung-ho driver and the least bothered by blood on his hands. Ciaran Hinds is the clean-up man, the calmest of the group and the first to have qualms about their assignment. Mathieu Kassovitz is a toy-maker turned bomb-maker, whose explosions aren't always on the money. And Hanns Zischler is the forger along the lines of Donald Pleasence in "The Great Escape."

In between assassinations, the men sit around as if they were having lunch at the Carnegie Deli. They kibbitz, complain and engage in almost Talmudic discussions about the nature of revenge.

This odd corned-beef-and-pastrami aspect of their operation is especially pointed in Avner's relationship with Ephraim, who can be a mensch one moment, an unforgiving, judgmental father figure the next.

Rush tends to steal every scene. The ones he doesn't are neatly pocketed by the wonderful French actors Michael Lonsdale and Mathieu Amalric, as a shadowy, cash-only father-son team who seem to know where all the bodies are, living and dead.

Bana is, frankly, problematic. We never get to know him as we should, so we're somewhat shut out of his moral and emotional journey. It's as if neither he nor Kushner could decide exactly whom Avner is supposed to be.

"Munich" merges the "Jaws" Spielberg and the "Schindler's List" Spielberg. The murders are brisk, bloody and intense. One scene, in which a bomb might harm the wrong person, is staged with the same edge-of-your-seat suspense he brought to shark attacks 30 years ago.

However, the conscionable Spielberg isn't always Spielberg at his best. "Munich," sometimes has more in common with the heavy-handed preachiness of his treacly "The Color Purple" than it does with "Saving Private Ryan." When he wants to "teach" us something, it takes his mind off how the movie should be shaped, how it moves, how the characters interact.

Admirably, "Munich" tries its best to be even-handed (there's already flak from both sides as to how well it succeeds). A Palestinian woman talks about 24 years of Israeli killings. A handsome young P.L.O. fighter speaks with great eloquence about the importance of a homeland for his people.

But Spielberg's deep and abiding connection to Jewish history is an inescapable presence. The Jews want a home, too, even if it's a strip of chalky, dried-out land. Is that what you want, Avner asks the young Palestinian. He could well ask himself the same question.

Home is as much an issue in "Munich" as the insanity of unending tit-for-tat violence. "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord. But whose Lord? And, whose home?

Spielberg asks the questions with great skill and greater sorrow. But he doesn't have the answers. Perhaps no one does.