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When a movie’s much advertised spycraft element violates every known rule of espionage, then the rest of the story better offer something more captivating.

Alas, that would not be the case with Munich: Edge of War, now streaming on Netflix, based on the 2017 international bestseller by Robert Harris.

The story focuses on British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s September 1938 Munich meetings with Adolph Hitler, in which he attempted a legend-making act of personal diplomacy: a last-minute deal to avert a larger European War by letting Hitler, who was threatening an invasion of Czechoslovakia, annex the German-speaking Sudetenland region. The ultimately futile effort gave appeasement a very bad name. 

Against that historic backdrop, we have the movie’s fictional story of two young men, a German and Englishman who had been close friends a few years earlier at Oxford. Hugh Legat (George MacKay, of 1917 fame) is private secretary to the doddering Chamberlain, p…