That was an excellent one.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

The story of how Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, ordered the systematic revenge killing of all the Palestinians who planned and executed the PLO massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 is the stuff of legend. This movie brings the legend alive and in a tighter, more gripping and better acted way that Spielberg's "Munich" did. Stephen Bauer, as the lead agent Avner recruited from the army by a senior Mossad officer, is more convincing than the doubt-ridden Eric Bana. A transfixing moment of the movie is the meeting Avna has with the IDF Chief of Staff and the Mossad Chief with PM Meir. With the nation of Israel hurting from the tragedy of the Olympic massacre, she sums up the dilemma of Israel and of the travails of the Jewish State as it seeks to exist surrounded by hostile enemies. Her steely resolve to extract full revenge for what the PLO is rendered excellently by Colleen Dewhurst. Whilst the "Sword of Gideon" tracks some of the actual killings, it portrays the dangerous life of a secret agent doing work of this nature. The movie is made more realistic by superb attention to location detail (made easier than "Munich" by being filmed only 15 years after the events). The camaraderie of the team of assassins is disrupted by the loss of various of the team. The movie explores the devastating emotional impact of both the loss of colleagues but of the brutality required to shoot or blow up the enemy. It also explores the complex motivations of people who do such work with particular attention paid to Avner's attempts to leave his assignment and the lengths his Mossad handler went to emotionally blackmail him to stay working for them.One comes away with an appreciation for the enormous task Israel faces. The moral dilemma of ensuring only terrorists are killed and the operational mantra to avoid collateral casualties at all costs versus the indiscriminate killing undertaken by the terrorist targets highlights the tightrope Israel must and continues to walk. It cannot allow acts of terror to go unmet as its enemies must know they will fight and fight hard, but in a world increasingly hostile to Israel's existence and the way it fights, it must exercise its considerable power and intelligence expertise with caution. The SOG shows this attitude has been front and center in Israeli operational planning for decades.

This made-for-TV movie is based on the book "Vengeance" by Jonas. Both are told from the viewpoint of "Avner" (played by Steven Bauer), an agent in Israel's secret service, who is recruited to lead a covert assassination squad dedicated to eliminating the terrorists responsible for the "Black September" attack on Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972.Israel launched different initiatives against the "Black September" terrorist organization. Avner's was deeply covert, involving a team of former Mossad agents, officially resigned from the secret agency, who operated completely independently and were paid like mercenaries. In this way the Israelis hoped to avoid disasters like the botched Lillehammer operation that killed an innocent man and resulted in the arrest of agents linked directly to Mossad.Avner and his team create their own mercenary network using Israeli money and set about their eye-for-an-eye operation. However the stress and paranoia of their task begins to eat away at their resolve and, when a team member is himself assassinated, the team takes its own revenge. Soon they feel unable to trust even their own countrymen...The telemovie is well done with good pacing and suspense. The moral and ethical issues that are the central theme are handled creditably and you come to care about the team members. There are strong supporting characters, particularly Rod Steiger as the team's Mossad contact "Mordechai Samuels" and Colleen Dewhurst as Israeli PM Golda Meir. Michael York also turns in a nice performance as the team's explosives expert.

Re the summary of this movie... It is a few years since I saw it, but I do not recall any of the "anti-war" or "anti Israel" sentiment suggested in the summary. Of course one takes movies like this with a pinch of salt from a historical point of view, but the message I got from it was distinctly "Don't Mess With Israel(is)".

Very good film, above average than most TV movies. The first-rate acting and storyline makes this very watchable, from beginning to end. You actually feel for the characters, and identify with their burdens and shortcomings. Highly recommend. I only regret it's not out on video.