Following the horrific events of the Munich 1972 Olympics, Israel vows revenge, hiring an obscure soldier Avner (Bana) to lead an assassination squad to track down the Palestinians responsible for killing 11 Israeli Olympians. His colleagues are a South African driver (Craig), a Belgian toy/bomb maker (Kassovitz), a clean-up expert (Hinds) and a German forgery specialist (Zischler). Taking their orders from a phantom boss (Rush) they travel around Europe dealing out sudden "justice". But the escalating violence eventually takes its toll.

The writers cleverly graft fictional characters onto real events, pulling us into the situations and the moral dilemmas. Bana is terrific as the human soul at the film's centre, a man who leaves his heavily pregnant wife (Zorer) to serve a larger cause, then slowly discovers what he's helped unleash. His internal struggle is deeply compelling, and he gets fine support from everyone around him, especially Craig as a man who deals in sure things, but finds the world to be grounded on shifting sands.

Spielberg and his adept crew give the film a startling tone that echoes gritty 1970s thrillers and really cranks up the suspense from time to time (although he relies too heavily on children in peril). Janusz Kaminski's cinematography strips all but essential colours from each scene, while John William's evocative score quietly underlines the emotion and suspense. This is such expert filmmaking that the meandering length is a surprising misstep.

The episodic structure simply wears us out--one more assassination, one more thing going wrong, one more emotive confrontation about the increasingly grey morality. But this is a starkly relevant, important story that intensely depicts how responding to terror with revenge only leads to more violence. "There is no peace at the end of this," Avner sighs. And in his haunted, paranoid, yearning face, we know exactly what he's talking about.

themes, strong violence, language, nudity, sexuality

12.Dec.05