Munich

Munich (2005) is arguably Steven Spielberg's best "serious" film. Heavy-handed and didactic at times, it's still one of Hollywood's more intelligent and reasonable takes on terrorism and the moral quandries of combatting it.

The Palestinian terrorist group Black September engineers the kidnapping and massacre of nine Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic games in Munich. Mossad agent Avner Kaufmann (Eric Bana) is personally recruited by a vengeance-minded Golda Meier (Lynn Cohen) to lead a team of crack agents on a deadly assignment: to unleash a campaign of vengeance against Black September, assassinating its leaders by any means necessary. Avner and his colleagues grow increasingly disillusioned by their work, finding their mission complicated by entanglements with the CIA and KGB, as well as a PLO-sanctioned counter-assassination team.

Spielberg and heavyweight scenarists Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and Eric Roth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) craft a smart look at a complex and troubling issue. Munich walks a tight-rope between condemning the Mossad action and seeing it as a cruel necessity; repeated flashbacks of the Munich massacre remind us that terrorism is a problem for Israel, regardless of the Palestinians' grievances against them. The Palestinians are allowed their say, particularly a nice debate between an undercover Avner and an articulate PLO leader (Omar Metwally), but Spielberg and Co. don't go overboard with moral equivalence either. Compared to the apolitical or stereotyped terrorists who usually populate Hollywood films - Die Hard, anyone? - it's refreshing to see such a thoughtful take on the subject.

The most convincing argument Spielberg and Co. marshal against counter-terrorism is its open-ended nature. The Mossad operation was a success, eliminating most of its targets, but did little to discourage the PLO at large. The scene where Avner and Co. track down a rival killer (the striking Marie-Josee Croze) is a brutal sequence that lays bare the essential nastiness of their mission. At base an act of vengeance, it's morally dubious but perhaps a necessity. By adopting such tactics, however, Israel risks lowering itself to the level of their enemies, a stark quandry Americans have constantly faced post-9/11.

Unfortunately, Spielberg was never a particularly subtle filmmaker, and this is occasionally to Munich's detriment. Throughout the movie we get lengthy scenes of Avner's team debating the ethics of their actions while in the field. Ciaran Hinds's obnoxious character is the worst offender: he's such a constant whiner that a viewer will question how he got attached to the mission in the first place. No doubt some of the Mossad had qualms about their mission, but these scenes ring as false as the commando debates in The Guns of Navarone. Generally speaking, men who kill for a living aren't as philosophical and introspective as Hollywood seems to think - at least not while in the process of killing.

Fortunately, Spielberg works around these rough patches. Munich plays as a slick, stylish thriller, with lots of intense action scenes and moody hand-held (but not shaky) photography thrown in. It doesn't lack for strong set-pieces, particularly the heart-breaking final flashback, even though Spielberg oddly juxtaposes it with a sex scene. The movie is a bit heavy on the homages to past films - an opening TV-watching sequence out of JFK, a hotel liaison from The Day of the Jackal, The Conversation's paranoid apartment-destruction - and a Spielberg-approved family angle is awkwardly worked in, but this sort of thing comes with the territory.

Eric Bana gives a solid performance in a difficult part. Daniel Craig has a superb "before-they-were-famous" role as Avner's fanatical right-hand man. A chameleon-like Geoffrey Rush shines in his spymaster role, making the most of a smallish part. Mathieu Almaric (Quantum of Solace) and Michael Lonsdale (The Day of the Jackal) get solid parts as a pair of anarchist informants.

Despite some rough patches, Munich is, on the whole, a successful movie. Many foreign films - The Battle of Algiers, The Baader-Meinhoff Complex - may have it beat, but Munich is still commendable as a film that's both thoughtful and entertaining.