Munich is a 2005 epic historical drama film produced and directed by Steven Spielberg, co-written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth.

Avner Kaufman, a Mossad agent of German-Jewish descent, is chosen to lead a mission to assassinate 11 Palestinians allegedly involved in the massacre.

At the direction of his handler Ephraim, to give the Israeli government plausible deniability, Kaufman resigns from Mossad and operates with no official ties to Israel.

His team includes four Jewish volunteers from around the world: South African driver Steve, Belgian toy-maker and explosives expert Robert, former Israeli soldier and "cleaner" Carl, and German antique dealer and document forger Hans from Frankfurt.

Between hits, the assassins argue with each other about the morality and logistics of their mission, expressing fear about their individual lack of experience, as well as their apparent ambivalence about accidentally killing innocent bystanders.

The squad moves on to London to track down Ali Hassan Salameh, who orchestrated the Munich massacre, but the assassination attempt is interrupted by several drunken Americans.

It is implied that these are agents of the CIA, which, according to Louis, protects and funds Salameh in exchange for his promise not to attack United States diplomats.

A disillusioned Avner flies to Israel, where he is unhappy to be hailed as a hero by two young soldiers, and then to his new home in Brooklyn, where he suffers post-traumatic stress, paranoia and has flashbacks from the Munich massacre.

Concerns continue to grow when he speaks to Louis' father by phone and it is revealed he knows his real name and promises no violence will come to him from his family.

On December 8 of that year Mahmoud Hamshari, a senior PLO figure, was killed in Paris by a bomb concealed in the table below his telephone.

Others killed during this period include Mohammed Boudia, Basil Al Kubaisi, Hussein al-Bashir, and Zaiad Muchasi, some of whose deaths are depicted in the film.

This attack included future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Yom Kippur War and Operation Entebbe participant Yonatan Netanyahu, who are both portrayed by name in the film.

Former Mossad operatives Gad Shimron and Victor Ostrovsky also dismissed the scene in which Prime Minister Golda Meir personally recruits Avner to lead the team as fiction.

Mossad veterans were critical of the modus operandi portrayed by the film, in which a single hit team is sent into the field for months, and which includes a forger and bomb-maker to enable it to function alone.

They claimed that in reality, the assassinations were conducted by large numbers of personnel, with hit teams assembled and sent out on an ad hoc basis, never spending more than a few days or at most weeks in the field, and withdrawn as soon as each mission was complete.

The all-male makeup of the team was criticized; former operatives claimed it was standard practice to include female agents on such missions to help get closer to targets.

[15][16] According to British intelligence writer Gordon Thomas, senior Mossad personnel, among them director general Meir Dagan, held a private viewing of the film, and "In the darkened cinema they sat first in silence and then a steady mounting murmured chorus of 'it could never have happened like this' … 'this is fantasy' … 'this is pure fiction' … 'this is history, Hollywood style'."

In an interview with Reuters, a retired head of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence service and former Internal Security Minister, Avi Dichter, likened Munich to a children's adventure story: "There is no comparison between what you see in the movie and how it works in reality".

The Jewish Journal said that "the revenge squad obsess about making sure only their targets are hit -- and meticulous care is taken to avoid collateral damage.

He says the film was based on a book whose source was an Israeli who claimed to be the lead assassin of the hit squad, but in fact, was a baggage inspector at Tel Aviv airport.

[34] James Berardinelli wrote that "Munich is an eye-opener – a motion picture that asks difficult questions, presents well-developed characters, and keeps us white-knuckled throughout."

[38] Rex Reed from The New York Observer disagrees, writing: "With no heart, no ideology and not much intellectual debate, Munich is a big disappointment, and something of a bore.

"[41] Chicago Tribune reviewer Allison Benedikt calls Munich a "competent thriller", but laments that as an "intellectual pursuit, it is little more than a pretty prism through which superficial Jewish guilt and generalized Palestinian nationalism" are made to "... look like the product of serious soul-searching."

Benedikt states that Spielberg's treatment of the film's "dense and complicated" subject matter can be summed up as "Palestinians want a homeland, Israelis have to protect theirs."

"[43] Israeli author and journalist Aaron J. Klein wrote in Slate that the movie was a "distortion" of facts, concluding that "A rigorous factual accounting may not be the point of Munich, which Spielberg has characterized as a 'prayer for peace.'