Inexplicably dreadful. Wait, it’s a Chris Weitz film, so dreadfulness entirely explicable. Instead, make that inexcusably dreadful. Released theatrically, this film on the hunt by Mossad agents to capture Nazi Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann and secretly bring him to Israel for trial looks made for tv. Not HBO or NetFlix, ABC Movie-of-the-Week. And while it’s possible that every word and action is 100% true, what matters is that nothing feels believable. Martin Orton, in a debut script, never convinces us of the stumbles that led the agents thru a series of lucky breaks & missteps to Eichmann, hiding in Argentina under a new name, The cast also no help, right from a prologue that sees them snatch and kill the wrong Nazi. (Good movie title there: THE WRONG NAZI.) Acting just as bad. Nick Kroll is just distracting as one of the Mossad guys, but what’s up with Oscar Isaac as the team's impulsive jokester? (The sole clever touch a bad dye job on Ben Kingsley’s hair as Eichmann.) I suppose Weitz thought he was humanizing agents normally portrayed as invincible, but making them incompetent bumblers who trip into success has the effect of making the Mossad look as if they were putting on an amateur theatrical version of THE LADYKILLERS/’55.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Similar themes, tactics and goals covered in Steven Spielberg’s MUNICH/’08 about the hunt for the 1972 Olympic murderers. And while it’s also unsatisfying (it even earned its own Watch This, Not That label), it fails at an entirely different level than Weitz can manage. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/munich-2005.html
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