review

just come back from seeing munich a film that i have mixed feelings about, it is a worthy film with some very strong performances and effective set pieces, but it is patchy and overly long, consequently it weakens the impact of the film.
eric bana goes from being the devoted son of isreal to a hard bitten cycnical realist by the end of the film. his one weakness is that he sometimes seem to be mumbling (though that could have been the sound system in the cinema).
the film is strongest in the iinteractions between the characters, surprisingly the action is where the film is generally at it's weakest.
i have no idea how accurate the film is in terms of the portrayal of the events, speilberg has structured the film very much as if it was a robert ludlum book crossed with a james bond movie mixed with a documentary. so it is the zigs and zags that make it work.

the film is on it's firmest ground when it is dealing the the interactions of the characters. there are only a few occassions when the actions of the mossad operatives are questioned, there is one impassioned speech from a palestinian to eric bana's character (who he thinks is a sympathiser with the palestinian cause) who basically it is all about having a home, which is an echo of the talk of family that bana and his companions often talk about. it is through these interactions we learn about the characters and discover that in a sense at this "level" of covert operations that there is a lack of real morality - that people might think that they are doing it for the best of reasons, but soon these are subsumed in the mire that terrorism creates.

it's worth going to see, but i do wish it was 30 minutes shorter - i dread to think how long the directors cut is going to be.

the film of january was "running scared" - mad mad action with edgy mtv direction. witih an ott ice rink fight. magic stuff.