Recensioni de* critic*

The filmmakers miss a golden opportunity to delve into the dynamics of a professional team—the Mossad agents are defined by a trait or two apiece, and their plans coalesce all too smoothly. Moreover, the conversations about bringing a monster like Eichmann to justice fail to spark any serious moral deliberation.

The action, realized in copious and meticulous detail (thanks to the script by Matthew Orton), is engrossing, and Weitz brings it to the screen with a clear, brisk, and energetic, albeit unoriginal, blend of espionage-centered action and dialogue-centered behind-the-scenes planning. Which is to say that it’s an ordinary—but very enjoyably ordinary—movie about an extraordinary subject.

To its credit, Operation Finale offers a rebuke to the sentimental but commonly held notion that the Nazis were an inhuman aberration. . . . One only wishes that the movie had not undermined this painful truth by resorting to the vulgar bromide that, having dispatched one source of the trauma inflicted on the Jewish people, its victims experienced closure.

“Operation Finale,” despite its other elaborations on the historical record, is engrossing and a little moving. And Isaac is a very winning and effective messenger of Peter Malkin’s heroism and humanity.

It’s a story very worth telling, told pretty well, with self-evident virtues and obvious limitations. Viewers who see it out of a sense of duty will find some pleasure in the bargain. Call it the banality of good.

The film fictionalizes setups and collapses factual details while trying to make Eichmann’s extraction play out with conventional suspense; it ends up a poor cousin to Argo.

Despite clichéd depictions of Nazi atrocities, the movie persuasively evokes, with its wealth of details, the slender threads on which historical events—and historical truth—depend.