I'm shocked to discover that the Robert Harris novel this tedious "thriller" is based on — titled simply Munich — was published only in 2018. Because the primary reaction I have to its movie version is mystification at how dated it feels. This is the same old by-the-numbers World War II–ing we've seen countless times before, finding nothing new to say and with no diverting suspense to offer in a milieu that has been extensively explored onscreen and in pop culture.
A mix of fact and reality, Munich: The Edge of War focuses more on the made-up stuff than the historical stuff — and if Harris or screenwriter Ben Power thought that was a better way to go, they should have invented a more gripping story. What we have here is earnest WWII fan-fic about former Oxford chums Hugh Legat (Geoge MacKay) and Paul von Hartman (Jannis Niewöhner). By 1938, the two indistinguishably bland young men find themselves on opposite sides of the brewing war, and conveniently placed in positions of relative power and influence. Hugh is private secretary to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, while Paul works high up at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. They had a falling out years ago, but now they will take it upon themselves to save Europe by thwarting Hitler's nefarious plans for continental domination.
Hugh and Paul are fictional, but this is true: In September 1938, Chamberlain (and other European leaders) went to Munich to get Hitler to agree not to invade the Czech region of Sudetenland, as he'd been threatening. It's even true that there was a plot among some high-ranking Germans to arrest or possibly assassinate Hitler, with that illegal invasion as the reason to remove the madman they could see would be Germany's downfall.
Any appeasement of Hitler by Chamberlain would merely delay the inevitable, and Hitler was certainly not going to stop with Sudetenland, as he had promised. So now Paul and Hugh, attached to their respective diplomatic delegations at the Munich summit, must engage in espionage shenanigans to get a secret document detailing Hitler's actual plan for Europe — which has made its way into Paul's possession — into Hugh's hands, and hence Chamberlain's, so the PM can appreciate just how dangerous Hitler really is.
Alas, it's just dull how casual these halfhearted spies are as they have meetings in crowded public places and openly discuss their supposedly covert business. Director Christian Schwochow seems unaware of any potential danger, too: He's not able to muster any suspense in these sequences, even when a third party does actually show up to get in the way. Paul insists to Hugh that they are "the last hope of stopping Hitler," and yet there's not a lick of urgency or tension.
The film looks elegant enough, even if Hugh and Paul are woefully underdeveloped (the few female characters are even worse). I'd say that the entire endeavor is fairly inoffensive, except for its apparent attempt to reimagine Chamberlain as a misunderstood hero playing 10-dimensional chess with Hitler instead of the naive appeaser historians have generally agreed he was. Jeremy Irons cuts a dashing figure as the prime minister — quite a contrast to Ulrich Matthes as a positively sniveling Hitler, as if Hitler needed to be portrayed even less flatteringly than usual. But completely missing here is Chamberlain's woefully miscalculated insistence that, with his agreement from Hitler in Munich, he had achieved "peace for our time."
I'm not sure anyone was looking for a rethink of Chamberlain, or that it is in any way warranted.
Perhaps the best thing this movie might have had going for it was a sense that intelligent young people who wanted to be optimistic about their futures were looking with total despair at their stodgy, hidebound elders and thier misguided attempts to fix the world. That idea could have resonated today. But there's nothing of the kind to be found in Munich. ♦
MUNICH: THE EDGE OF WAR
