This is a rather flat docudrama. The story—Israeli agents' dangerous bid to capture Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and bring him to trial in their country—possesses an inherent historical fascination, but the film never breathes life into it. It is streamlined, safe, and polished to an almost sanitized disagree; it has no internal drive and no point-of-view beyond an understandable-but-nonspecific moral revulsion. It falls leagues short of, say, Munich or the extremely undervalued Anthropoid; those films, both also involving the meeting of vengeance and justice, rendered history in the suspenseful present tense and vividly portrayed the physical perils and moral conundrums endured by their characters.

Neither star is served particularly well. Oscar Isaac is fit and blandly charismatic, but his character feels underdeveloped and uncomfortably shoehorned into being the de facto protagonist; more development of the other team members (beyond the Love Interest, the Angry One, etc.) would have resulted in richer drama. And Ben Kingsley is miscast as Eichmann; a legendary actor of elastic ethnicity, he can obviously play stern, malevolent, and magisterial notes in his sleep, but too often Eichmann as a character is overshadowed by the sense of, "This is Kingsley portraying Eichmann with his usual actorly toolkit." The performance feels oddly predictable when it should be enigmatic and menacing.