Munich
Also reviewed by:
Uncle Cliff
When I think of intelligent action films that have worked, I think of films like The Bourne Identity, The Professional, and the films of James Cameron. It's a difficult genre to do right, yet somehow these films manage to make you care about something more than the next shoot-out, the next car chase or the next explosion.
In Spielberg's Munich, a film about the agents assigned to assassinate the Palestinian terrorists who took 11 Israeli athletes hostage in 1972, I was just waiting for the action.
Though it begins incredibly well, with a tense scene in which the terrorists invade the athletes' quarters, it is soon followed by at least a half hour of chit-chat about politics and morality. Here I was, wanting to get to know the key players, but they were all too busy debating the subtext of the film. And this is pretty much how the rest of the film plays out: an exciting, high-tension sequence, followed by a boring conversation, over and over again.
Two-and-something hours never seemed so long. I recall at one point the agents report that they have killed six out of the eleven terrorists, and I thought to myself, "Hurry up and kill them!" – not because I was experiencing some complex moral dilemma where I could actually justify murder given the heinous acts committed by the terrorists, but because I was so bloody bored!
And you better believe Spielberg pulled out his much-loved fourth act at the end, which always makes a film drag on. If he was making Jaws today, he'd include another 40 minutes at the end of Chief Brody heading back to the city, and finding it difficult to move on with his life or some unnecessary crap like that.
If this film was going to have any impact at all, it needed to be personal, not political. It should have replaced those extended scenes of debate with stronger characters. Characters with such profound emotions that they wouldn't know how to talk about them. Instead, we get characters so superficial, the only way to tell them apart is by their accents or their costumes.
As it is, Munich is an action film so intelligent, it discusses all the issues and themes of the film for you, rather than inspiring you to do it yourself after watching it.
On another note, this is yet another dull and passive role for Eric Bana. If nothing else comes of his career, you can't say he wasn't given some damn good opportunities, going from a small Australian film such as Chopper to lead roles in films directed by some of Hollywood's finest. Yet I still struggle to understand how he continues to do so well. He was awesome in Chopper, but since hitting the big time, his choice of film roles has been really bad, and he has been really bad in them.