Review of Eichmann (2007) by Stephen T — 15 May 2015

What can you say? This film had potential...a lot. Here you have a chance to make a modern-day classic. A courtroom drama on the level of Judgment at Nuremburg (1961, Stanley Kramer) or a more personal drama like The Verdict (1982, Sidney Lument) could have been the result of a more focused script.

Alas, we have a mediocre film with a running time of about 100 minutes; not enough time to do justice to the film's potential. Although, there are glimpses of what might have been and these make the film worth watching: (1) The actual subject of Adolf Eichmann's trial isn't discussed very frequently nowadays and it is refreshing to see it in a public light; (2) the acting is good, but Thomas Kretschmann as Eichmann is great; Kretschmann alone is reason enough to view the film; and (3) a clear theme emerges throughout the film despite the script's lack of focus, which is the "banality of evil" as personified by Eichmann; it is not a new theme as Hannah Ardent proposed it as her thesis in the classic book: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).

The theme is as timely today as it was then and makes a great topic for research. Despite these glimpses of potential greatness, the film skews into questionable historical waters and goes for the splinter approach of trying balance the Avner Less home story, workplace politics, historical and familial flashbacks, and the Holocaust as an event and a memory.

It is just too much for the time frame and the film suffers as a result. If only, if only...