Operation Finale

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Rating:3/5

Nazis — remember when they were largely a thing of the past? As Chris Weitz’s true-life thriller reminds us, long before there was an unfortunate smattering of irresponsible “The Nazi Next Door” articles clogging up your Twitter feed, there were literal Gestapo bigwigs and German war criminals living, secretly but side by side, among the postwar population of South American countries. (Sympathies to fascist ideologies, lax extradition laws, yadda yadda yadda.) Men like Adolf Eichmann (Sir Ben Kingsley), a former lieutenant colonel and a particularly nasty National Socialist who was the brains behind the “Final Solution”; after fleeing Europe, he settled in Buenos Aires under the name “Ricardo Clement,” living with his wife (welcome back, Greta Scacchi!), their teenage son Klaus (Joe Alwyn) and a toddler. Occasionally, Ricardo will regale the local anti-Semites with tales of Hitler and extermination. Mostly, he goes to his job or stays at home.

Once Klaus takes his new girlfriend, Sylvia (Haley Lu Richardson), to an informal gathering of Nazism enthusiasts, however, word makes its way back to Israel that the SS-Obersturmbannführer they’ve been looking for may have been located. A team of Mossad agents, led by a redemption-seeking secret agent named Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac), travel to Argentina to verify the intelligence. Once the target’s identity is confirmed, the group gets their marching orders: do not kill Eichmann. This is a “strictly catch and extract” operation. He is to be brought back to Israel to stand trial for war crimes in the country of his victims. “For the first time in history,” a character says, “we will judge our executioner.”