Rental: Munich 1. After reading the rave reviews that came up when Munich was released I'm left with the conclusion that Munich is either a very subjective film, or I'm just a shallow, unsympathetic freak. I just don't get it. To make matters worse, when I sat down to write this review, I had an epifany: Munich is a comedy that's only missing the comedic soundtrack and sound effects. Go ahead, blink in appalled consternation if you want. Go rent it and play it with the sound off and the soundtrack to something like Big Top Pee-Wee or Johnny English playing. It works, doesn't it. Munich is a comedy. Witness the bumbling toy maker who makes bombs for the assassin group admit that he really only takes bombs apart, not make them. (Wa-wa-wa-waaaa!) Witness one of his bombs, made with too much explosives, go off in a hotel room not only blowing the intended target to smithereens (leaving an arm spinning on the ceiling fan) but blowing out the walls of the adjoining hotel rooms as well, one occupied by a randy couple and the other by the leader of the assassin group himself. Witness the group's trusted informant house the group in a safehouse that he simultaniously houses the group's adversaries in where they fought over what radio station to listen to. It's non-stop hijinks!

Munich wants to be raw and sobering, and it was that rawness that initially prevented me from seeing this comedy goldmine in its proper light. The movie has almost no character development (a conscious choice on the part of the director), jumping from one assassination to the next. Typically, TV and movie fare are dumbed down (which infuriates me), assuming the audience are a bunch of half-wits who wouldn't understand what "bigotry" means without a dictionary handy. But Munich could have used a little dumbing down. Many things simply weren't explained. Why didn't the group just dump the nimrod bomb maker? Why wasn't the contact quetioned (if not outright killed) for putting them in the same crappy apartment as the people they were working against? I needed just a touch more exposition.

I really wanted to give Munich a higher rating, but looking over the Creepy Scale, I just couldn't. It's not worth renting. It's not worth setting your VCR for. It's not even better than Ishtar. I'm left with the (sadly) all-too-familiar feeling that those stuffy movie reviewers (many of whom probably never even watch a film before writing a review) were left with a serious amount of wool upon their eyeballs. They saw that jewish director Steven Spielberg, who brought them the acclaimed Schindler's List (yawn) was making a movie about the jewish retaliation for the '72 Olympic hostage killings and thought "this will be a historic, groundbreaking film. It will be fantastic!" It's not. Not even a little.  ¶ 11:12 AM