‘Operation Finale’ is mostly a success

Posted on September 7, 2018

By MARK VIOLA

At the end of World War II, one of the most infamous Nazis, Adolf Eichmann, escaped justice and went into hiding. Credited as the mastermind behind the “Final Solution” — otherwise known as the Holocaust — Eichmann and his family would eventually find their way to Argentina in South America, where pro-Nazi sympathies were not uncommon in the decades following the war.

In 1960, upon learning of Eichmann’s whereabouts, a team of Israeli agents was sent to Argentina on a mission to capture Eichmann alive and bring him back to Israel to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

The story of that mission is the basis for the new film “Operation Finale,” directed by Chris Weitz (“About a Boy,” “The Golden Compass”) and starring Ben Kingsley (“Iron Man 3”) as Eichmann and Oscar Isaac (“Star Wars: The Last Jedi”) as Peter Malkin, who led the team sent to capture him.

The resulting film does a good job of maintaining tension despite the fact that many in the audience know generally how the story will end. Less successful is the script, which suffers from an odd reliance on witty banter to keep the film from being overly somber due to the subject matter. Comic relief is fine, but not all of it — or even most of it — lands the way the writers were probably hoping it would.

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