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Movie review: Ben Kingsley gives chilling performance in disappointing 'Operation Finale'

“Operation Finale” — ★ ★ ½

Talk about the banality of evil.

Chris Weitz's fact-based, post-World War II wannabe thriller “Operation Finale” exemplifies the banality of historical dramas.

“Operation Finale” feels and looks like a made-for-network-TV version of Steven Spielberg's “Munich,” with most of the dramatic tension and sharp editing removed.

It's the kind of emotionally distanced drama in which the characters actually tell us how we should have felt about the scene we just saw, but didn't.

Oscar Isaac stars as Peter Malkin, one of several Israeli agents from the Mossad and Shin Bet assigned to locate and capture Adolf Eichmann (Ben Kingsley), the Nazi architect of the “Final Solution” to wipe out the Jewish people.

In 1960, the Israelis get word that Eichmann might be hiding in an unassuming house outside of Buenos Aires in Argentina, a noted sanctuary for the Nazis.

Malkin teams with a doctor and his former lover Hanna Elian (Melanie Laurent), co-worker Rafi Eitan (Nick Kroll) and several other agents to sneak into Argentina, abduct Eichmann, drug him, dress him like an Israeli agent, then smuggle him out by airplane without alarming authorities or local Nazis.

That way, Eichmann will stand trial and the world can see what he and the Nazis did.

By its second half, “Operation Finale” becomes a cluttered collection of unconvincing complications designed to ratchet up the suspense.

Oh, no! There's not room for everyone on the plane!

Oh, no! The plane can't take off without those missing papers!

Key supporting characters disappear without explanation.

The alleged romance between Malkin and the doctor doesn't realistically inform the characters, who barely suggest the intimacy of acquaintances.

Kingsley, who won an Oscar for playing “Gandhi,” paints a chilling portrait of Eichmann, a smart, genocidal bureaucrat who calmly kills families as if ordering the destruction of contaminated meat.

But it doesn't bode well for a drama when its most powerful components are brief black-and-white glimpses of actual Holocaust horrors.

• • •

Starring: Oscar Isaac, Ben Kinglsey, Melanie Laurent, Nick Kroll

Directed by: Chris Weitz

Other: An MGM release. Rated PG-13 for language, violence. 109 minutes

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