Revenge that's not so sweet

It must have taken some courage for a hugely successful Jewish American, especially after 9/11, to make a film which suggests that counter-terrorism - in reply to acts of terrorism - not only causes the death of innocent people but breeds further violence.

Steven Spielberg has done exactly this in his long and detailed movie about the futility of revenge, notably the covert Israeli reaction to the kidnapping and eventual death of 11 of their athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

That terrible event, compounded by error and panic, has already been ably described in Kevin Macdonald's Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September. Here we see it again, but watch how Golda Meir's Israeli government planned its retribution by sending off five men in pursuit of the surviving perpetrators of the massacre.

The five, led in the film by lowly Mossad operative Avner (Eric Bana), were to go about their work in secret without recognition from either Mossad or the government, regardless of success or failure. They would be alone, comforted perhaps by the wads of money in a Swiss bank and by the hearty good wishes from those few in the know back home.

Munich isn't really a thriller about how they do it, though that does hold some fascination - even if it is invented by a film-maker whom some consider to be an arch-manipulator of emotions. The film's raison d'être is to suggest that the men, and particularly their leader, ultimately reject what they have to do as mad and counterproductive.

Is it? For sure, the current chase after Bin Laden might, if finally successful, make the world feel better. But would it prevent his henchmen and followers from attempting to revenge his death or capture? The discovery and imprisonment of Saddam scarcely stopped the violence in Iraq.

This is Spielberg's strongest point. But his film is at its weakest when it suggests that there is no moral difference between the five assassins - who killed innocent people by mistake on their way to wiping out those responsible for the Munich murders - and the Palestinian terrorists at the Olympics who murdered innocents on purpose.

Spielberg tries hard to make the film clear and simple enough for a mass audience to digest. He doesn't characterise the Palestinians as villains but rather as people who believe in what they have done to publicise their cause, as much as the Israelis believe in their own right to kill them.

He depicts with dramatic emphasis exactly how innocent people suffered. Two lovers in a hotel, for instance, are mortally injured when a Palestinian is blown up with a bomb in the room next door.

Another of the film's virtues is to show how much Israel means to the Jewish nation and how difficult it is for Bana's character to even begin to doubt the policies of his homeland. This makes his eventual rejection of the killings the more powerful, and the pain of his superiors at what looks like treason the more palpable.