The team's work -- their orders have come from Mossad officer Efraim (Geoffrey Rush), a government servant so dutiful and inscrutable he barely seems like a human being -- is ruthless and specific. "Use guns if you have to," they've been told, "but bombs are preferable." They're also urged to spare civilians at all costs. So they begin methodically hunting down their targets, often with the help of a shady Parisian contact, Louis (Mathieu Amalric, in an astonishing, finely chiseled performance), who runs his family business, an outfit capable of tracking down anyone, anywhere. The assassins begin with a Palestinian poet and translator living in Italy, a seemingly gentle soul who has passed information to the terrorists; their next target, a Parisian-based Palestinian, represents a trickier job and one that could take the lives of the man's wife and daughter as well.

We feel the weight of these acts before the assassins do, which is all part of Spielberg's exquisite, unnerving cleverness. The poet-translator, chatting so jovially with a shopkeeper, seems like such a nice guy; it gives us no pleasure to see a bullet go through his chest. (He has just come back from the store, clutching a bag of groceries; a milk bottle inside shatters -- shades of John McGiver's murder in the original "The Manchurian Candidate" -- and the man's blood puddles on the floor in a milky swirl, possibly a visual metaphor for the commingling of purity and guilt.) And the second target's young daughter, who will supposedly be at school when the bomb planted in her family's flat goes off, suddenly rushes back into the building just as the device is about to be detonated. Spielberg pulls the strings taut in this sequence; his intent is to make us squirm, and if his technique is a little obvious, at least his ideas are clear: If you want revenge, this is the risk you run. Each act of violence makes us feel queasy with complicity; it's just a matter of time before the men committing these acts feel it too.

And eventually, they do feel it. But, strangely -- or maybe not -- the movie begins to lose its power just as the assassins start to reckon with their actions. The movie's middle section raises some difficult questions about the uses, and the occasional necessity, of violence. At one point Carl, responding to some of the team members' sudden doubts about the validity of what they're doing, asks them how they think the Israeli state came to be in the first place. "How do you think we got the land?" he asks. "By being nice?"

In Greece, while attempting to kill one of the team's most significant targets, Avner encounters a young member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (who believes Avner is part of a European espionage outfit, not an Israeli one). "You don't know what it is not to have a home," he tells Avner, and we can see the flicker of enlightenment in Avner's eyes. He seems to be pondering, for the first time, the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and also failing to realize that while homelessness could be seen as motivation for terrorism, it doesn't excuse it). From there, we see Avner struggling more and more with the ethical weight of his mission. And when he finally sees his toddler daughter, for only the second time, he realizes he wants out. His ultimate realization: Violence begets violence.

And he's not wrong. But the problem with "Munich" is that Spielberg has made a beautifully crafted, intelligent picture that raises some very complicated, and not easily dismissed, moral questions -- only ultimately to find the easiest way to dismiss them. Avner's realization that violence doesn't solve anything is cemented just before the movie's final shot: It's 1973; Avner now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife and daughter, and the last thing Spielberg shows us is the World Trade Center in the distance.

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