Movie Review - Operation Finale

Oscar Isaac is probably best known for his role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) in which he played Poe Dameron, a hotshot pilot. For years before, he had been starring in smaller films and had really been giving great performances. Yet, the recent Star Wars movies have made him more a household name, maybe not to the level of Harrison Ford but he's getting there. He's building clout, so much so that within the space of a month, he's had two wide-release films with him as the lead come out. There are some young and often, white actors who get lucky and get that kind of break, but Isaac is 39 years-old and a minority. He's Latino, and Latinos don't often get to be the lead in most Hollywood films. Here, he plays Peter Malkin, a Jewish agent working for Mossad in Israel.

Peter Malkin was a real person who was responsible for arresting and helping to bring to trial Adolf Eichmann in 1960. Eichmann was a Nazi war criminal who was known as being the architect of the Final Solution. He oversaw the trains that delivered tons and tons of Jewish people to the concentration camps where they were murdered. Malkin's mission to retrieve Eichmann was classified until now and this film, directed by Chris Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon and About a Boy), tells the story of the two-month mission in Argentina where Eichmann lived in hiding.

Obviously, the two missions are wildly different, but the feeling of this movie as well as some of the incidents did invoke Ben Affleck's Argo (2012). Both involved people of one country who were trapped in another. Both involved spies trying to get those people out and both have very climactic scenes at an airport. This movie doesn't have the sticky situation of how it portrays its antagonists. Everyone agrees Nazis are bad. In that regard, this movie might be more entertaining than Argo because it's more morally black-and-white, but I'm not sure it's more tense or thrilling.

Ben Kingsley (Sexy Beast and Gandhi) co-stars as Adolf Eichmann and it's unclear if we're supposed to consider him as we do Adolf Hitler or if we're meant to have some doubt about him. Kingsley is skilled at providing humanity and warmth to any character he portrays or in the opposite providing menace and evil. He mainly does the latter here. Yet, conversations between Peter and Adolf seem to suggest that we're to think the former, but I didn't see the point of those conversations because in reality, there is no doubt about Eichmann.

The point could simply be to give Isaac some acting scenes opposite Oscar-winner Kingsley. Argo is the comparison I made, but there have been a couple of closer comparisons. Argo is about an American dealing with Iranians. However, two films have what this film has, Israelis or Jewish people dealing with Nazis, specifically war criminals from the Holocaust who got away. One is Walk on Water (2005) and the other is The Debt (2011).

Walk on Water was better at delving into the issue of justice versus vengeance, as well as the legacy of Nazism as far as passing it on to the next generation. I thought this film might address this issue with Joe Alwyn (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk) who plays Klaus Eichmann, the son of Adolf Eichmann, and the idea of him falling in love with a Jewish girl named Sylvia, played by Haley Lu Richardson (Columbus and The Edge of Seventeen). Unfortunately, this movie drops that idea and just makes Klaus a more straight-forward anti-Semite.

The Debt was better in simply being a more tense thriller. The Debt is complete fiction, so it had more room for dramatic invention. This film is based on facts and probably couldn't just inject action scenes like fights, shoot-outs or car chases, but I'm not sure this movie does a good enough job of making us feel the stakes for the characters, the personal stakes in fact.

Ohad Knoller (Yossi and The Bubble) plays Ephraim Ilani, a Mossad agent who gets identified early on. When Klaus launches his search for Adolf, the identity of Ephraim is something that he has and fuels his search, but nothing comes of that. Ephraim isn't in any danger or distinguished from the half-dozen or so other Mossad agents. Knoller is a great actor but he's almost wasted in this role.

Rated PG-13 for disturbing thematic content, violent images and language.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 2 mins.