‘OPERATION FINALE’

PG-13 1:58

The perfume of prestige and the promise of whiteknuckle thrills announce the arrival of “Operation Finale” before the movie has even begun. Two big stars — Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley and Oscar Isaac — face off as fugitive Nazi Adolph Eichmann and Mossad agent Peter Malkin, in the true story of the 1960 capture of Eichmann by a team of Israeli operatives in Argentina. It is there that Eichmann, the mastermind behind the Nazis’ extermination policies, has been secretly living for 10 years, under the alias Ricardo Klement and the cover of a job in a Mercedes factory outside Buenos Aires.

Code-named Operation Finale, Malkin’s mission was not an assassination, but an extraction, from under the noses of Buenos Aires’ community of expat German anti-Semites and their Argentine sympathizers. Sounds dramatic, no? And for a while, it is. Opening with a short 1954 prologue that shows Malkin botching an earlier assignment — to demonstrate that the character is in need of redemption — the film quickly jumps to the tense preparations for, and carrying-out of, Eichmann’s capture. But the hard part begins only after Eichmann has been removed to a safe house, where he must be held until Malkin’s team can persuade him to sign an affidavit affirming his true identity.

This portion of the story — the bulk of the film — contains the real catand-mouse game, as Malkin and Eichmann engage in a dance of dueling intellects, with the two men debating the nature of evil. In the end, “Operation Finale” misses its aim — to illuminate the banality of evil — by that much, as the TV spy Maxwell Smart used to say.

Starring: Ben Kingsley, Oscar Isaac (Contains disturbing thematic material, related violent images, and some coarse language.)

— Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post