Dead Cant Rant

We watched Sword of Gideon last night and I for one was profoundly disappointed. Nearly a year ago I read the book “Vengeance” on which the movie is based and while the movie was “generally” true to the book’s basic premise it was wildly inaccurate in several ways.

Of course, the book has been called “nonsense, totally baseless”, so…

As always, plot spoilers will follow. Deal.

Plot Synopsis

In the wake of the 1972 Munich massacre, Israel decides to create a covert hit team dedicated to killing individual terrorists throughout Europe. Avner, Israeli commando and son of a renowned Israeli agent, is recruited to head a team of five specialists on a continent-wide manhunt to bring justice to those who support and architect such terrorist attacks. The team will operate with absolutely no official sanction, outside the bounds of all national laws, literally operating exactly as the terrorists do. His father warns him against trusting the agency because he was left to rot in a French prison after they disavowed all knowledge of his actions, but he believes it will not happen to him. His wife Shoshanna supports him, but worries about what will become of him after they are finished. Working from safehouses established all across Europe and utilizing an underground criminal information network, they stalked and killed high-level terrorists one by one. After the deaths of several of his team, Avner and the survivors are recalled to Israel, where he decides to quit and has to fight against the Israeli government to be allowed to live in peace with his wife and newborn son.

Discussion

Given the basic plot above you have the makings of a decent spy/action movie. Unfortunately, given the horrible script and wooden acting, not to mention the poor direction and editing, the movie falls flat on its face. To someone not familiar with the original book and history this may be a compelling movie, but to me it was merely tepid. The actor playing Avner seemed chosen more for his David Hasselhoff looks than his acting abilities. At the end of the movie, after Avner has quit and had his finances ruined by the Mossad and he is working as a taxi driver, Reneé commented that he should have gotten a job as a male fashion model because he fit the role so well!

The real story differs in many ways: Avner has left the Army when he is recruited, and is seriously considering a job for an airline to support his desire to marry Shoshanna — they are not yet married, though they are shortly thereafter and she is pregnant by the time his training is complete and he leaves for Europe. The movie completely eliminates Avner’s specialized training in tradecraft (though I understand the DVD has some scenes of this) and one of the most fascinating characters in the entire book: Dave.

Most of the instructors were young, perhaps four or five years older than Avner. An exception was the firearms instructor, a man named Dave. He had the face of a sixty-year-old, though his body was as lean and tough as a twenty-five-year-old athlete’s. Avner had seen few men in such good shape.

Dave was an American, an ex-Marine who had never learned to speak Hebrew properly. Avner, as well as some of the others, would have been glad to speak with him in English, but Dave insisted on Hebrew. “You learn goddamn gun, I learn goddamn language,” he said to Avner in a gritty drawl like Popeye, when they first met. For some reason, it gave a curious authority to his voice, “We both learn good, hey?”

…

To begin with, he was a fanatic about physical conditioning. Not strength, but coordination. “You think weight lifter shoot good?” Dave would ask. “Weight lifter shoot goddamn shit. You want to throw rocks at enemy, you go lift weight. You want to shoot him, you jump rope. Like little girl.”

…

“You want to learn target shooting, you go join Olympic club. I teach you goddamn combat shooting.” … “A bullet not a goddamn horsefly, it don’t follow you around. A bullet go in a straight line.” If you knew something about the other guy’s weapon, you’d often have a split-second to decide which direction the bullet was most likely to travel and duck the other way. “You see he has revolver, maybe. You smart, you know all revolver pull right, a little, even if he’s a goddamn chamption. So you duck right. You not so smart, you duck left, and he got you. Right there. Like bingo.”

At which point Dave would poke a flat forefinger between Avner’s eyes.

Dave was also the source of the half-powder .22 introduced in the movie by Robert the bomber. Supposedly Dave brought this idea to the Mossad and revolutionized the way their field agents operated.

Dave had even insisted on reducing the load: the amount of explosive charge in the cartridges. As a result the small .22s had an even lower muzzle velocity and shorter range than usual. On the other hand, they made only a quiet popping noise — something like pffm — when they went off. They needed no silencers….

“You worry, is little gun?” Dave would ask. “You want big gun? Your enemy maybe elephant? Your enemy maybe tank? If your enemy tank, no gun big enough, you want bazooka. But if your enemy man, little gun enough.”

The army trained soldiers to fire several rounds every time they pulled the trigger. “Hell, you big agent in London,” Dave would say sarcastically, “maybe you want machine pistol, Heckler and Koch, good gun, fire a bullet a second. Somebody look you cross-eyed, you kill everybody in subway.” …

“You no goddamn cop, ” was Dave’s point. “You agent. Secret agent. You pull a gun, you good for nobody, you blow your goddamn cover. You never pull your gun for warning. Please, mister, be good boy. No. You pull your gun, you shoot.

“And if you shoot, you kill.”

Also absent from the movie is Andreas, Avner’s longtime friend from Europe. It was Andreas, not Avner’s father, who introduced Avner to Le Group, the French anarchist group that supplied him with information and services throughout their missions. Papa never knew Avner’s father, and Avner only met him after establishing contacts with Andreas’ friends in the Baader Meinhoff gang of German terrorists.

Avner knew Andreas because, while a sabra or native-born Israeli, he was also a Yekke — a Western-oriented Jew of “refined and cultured tastes” who believed Western Europe was the pinnacle of civilization — who had grown up in Europe where they had met and spent time together. This is also missing from the movie: the conflict between Avner as a Yekke and the Galicianers who ran the kibbutz and are exemplified by Samuels in the movie: greedy and clannish Jews from Eastern Europe. Avner hated them and looked down upon them with contempt, because they wanted to run farms and establish settlements and he wanted to be John Wayne saving the world.

I mentioned earlier that Steven Bauer didn’t do Avner justice, because Avner was extremely detail-oriented and and excellent planner. He would plan a raid with multiple backup plans and escape routes, spending a massive amount of time in observation of the target and his surroundings and ensuring everyone knew the plan thoroughly before executing the mission. Bauer’s character belongs in a soap opera rather than in a movie of international espionage; in fact, at times the movie dialogue and acting seems almost directly lifted from a soap opera — which, considering the 1986 date of the movie, is not entirely unrealistic.

Another major flaw in the movie is the timeline: Shoshanna is pregnant when Avner leaves, and at the end of the movie his son is perhaps four months old, a total of just over one year duration. In reality the mission took three years to complete. And Shoshanna did not visit him in New York by sneaking into one of his safehouses — he had her fly to New York because he could not return to Israel to visit her, and this way they could see each other periodically. There was never a mission safehouse in New York. At the end of the movie, Avner returns to Israel to fight in the Yom Kippur War. In the book, Avner snuck back into Israel in the middle of their mission to aid in the war effort, and when discovered he was thanked for his patriotism and kicked back out.

One theme dominates the movie: Avner’s belief that “eye for an eye” is a futile way to fight terrorism. This is far different from what Avner felt in the book. He truly believed in what he did, bringing justice to terrorists who otherwise were allowed to roam freely throughout Europe plotting the murder of children. The closest he felt to what was expressed in the movie was regret that he had to kill other human beings to accomplish this goal, but he knew that was the only way — this was nothing more than the normal human emotion experienced when a man has to kill to save his own life or the life of his family, disgust that a human being is now dead and their family may never know why he had to die. But he never regretted eliminating the terrorists themselves, and it annoyed us both that the movie chose to delve into moral equivalence to portray that Avner and his group had become much the same as their targets. Nothing could be further from the truth.

All in all, the movie follows the basic storyline of the book, but after the first hour becomes very loose with the “facts” in the original text and begins to preach painfully on the supposed “evils” of hunting down and killing terrorist scum in their own hiding places in ways designed to make them feel hunted like the rats they are. Wooden acting and a lousy script destroy what could otherwise be a very interesting movie. We can only hope that Spielberg does a better job this Christmas, but somehow we doubt it.

Final Verdict