Munich

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ciaran Hinds, Geoffrey Rush, Lyn Cohen

9/10

Thirty years after the grisly act, the guns are still booming in West Asia. Nothing much has changed: hostage-taking, mass murder, covert operations and assassinations. Steven Spielberg held on to the script (based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning author George Jonas’s Vengeance) for close to three years (for the sheer sensitivity of the Israel-Palestinian conflict) before terming his high-pressure action thriller “a prayer for peace”.

After 11 athletes are murdered by gunmen belonging to a PLO offshoot, Black September, at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Israel seeks bloody vengeance. Mossad sets up a crack team headed by a young agent Avner Kauffman (played absolutely brilliantly by Australian actor Eric Bana) assisted by a South African hitman, a toymaker-cum-bombmaker, a mop-up guy, a master forger and an ever-manipulative agent.

But you cannot please them all. Apprehending that he could be pilloried for being a fierce Jew (he is a famous one), he received brickbats when he portrayed Eric Bana as a tormented, angst-ridden soul at the end. The Palestinians didn’t spare him either. Massacre mastermind Mohammad Daoud (from somewhere in West Asia) slammed Spielberg for not asking him “about the truth”.

Is Munich the truth about what happened in Munich? Did the Mossad actually eliminate the killers? Experts differ. Let them. What comes out is a sympathetic yet anguished account of a slaughter and its aftermath, of terrorists and counter-terrorists — the thin red line almost indistinguishable.

Peace is a far cry.

Pallabi Biswas