REVIEWED - MUNICH: Steven Spielberg's taut political thriller powerfully demonstrates how dealing in death comes with a price, writes Donald Clarke

FOR such a long film, for a work that has caused so much controversy, Steven Spielberg's study of the aftermath of the Black September attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics is remarkably easy to summarise. We begin with a brief, skilfully edited account, mostly comprising contemporaneous news footage, of the killing of 11 Israeli athletes by Arab gunmen. We end with a contemplative epilogue in Brooklyn.

The middle of this viscera sandwich sees a disparate gang of Mossad agents - stoic leader Eric Bana, logistics expert Ciarán Hinds, hard-man Daniel Craig, others - travelling the world, killing (can we say murdering without annoying certain lobbies?) the supposed perpetrators.

There are some complications and diversions: a dalliance with a mysterious French organisation that sells information to independent operators; a blackly comic sequence where the group finds itself billeted in the same safe house as PLO operatives; an attempt by a femme fatale to lay a honey trap. But, for the most part, what we get in the central two hours is killing.

Much of the technical detail is fascinating, and a couple of the set-pieces, notably a desperate attempt to stop a bomb annihilating the wrong person, are as tense as anything Spielberg has done in three decades. More often, however, the effect is deliberately draining and revolting.

The key scene in the film has the camera discover a mangled torso hanging from a ceiling fan at the site of a bombing. As such images pile up, they - and the film's insistent repetitiveness - contrive to heap weary nausea on the viewer. If Munich is about anything, it is about the way cycles of violence debase and degrade the perpetrators.

This seems a commendable enough aim, but Munich has still managed to infuriate supporters of both the Arab and Israeli causes in the United States. Complaints from Jewish groups have been more forceful and have focused on two related areas. It is said that Spielberg humanises the Palestinian terrorists and that he draws an equivalence between the actions of the agents and those of Black September.

Since the terrorists patently are human, it hardly seems worth addressing the first point. As for the second, to question the moral basis of the Israeli response - as Bana's character eventually does - is not to suggest that the Mossad team are as culpable as those who murdered the athletes.

Unusually for a Spielberg film, Munich, whose script comes from the odd team of Angels in America's Tony Kushner and Forrest Gump's Eric Roth, almost manages to avoid spelling out any such explicit messages. It almost becomes the director's first properly ambivalent film.

Almost. Sadly, Spielberg or his writers felt the need to insert a line explaining in words of less than one syllable that such acts of vengeance will produce ever-greater atrocities from Israel's enemies. Then, for those viewers who weren't paying attention, he includes a glimpse of the World Trade Centre in the final shot.

Nice try, Steven. You almost managed to avoid being yourself.