The Debt

Synopsis: In 1966, three Mossad agents , Stephan (Marton Csokas), David (Sam Worthington), and Rachel (Jessica Chastain) entered East Berlin in order to capture Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), the "Butcher of Birkenau," and deliver him to Israel for trial. The mission fails and the three have to face the consequences that will dog them for the rest of their lives.

The Debt is one of those films that makes you wonder why it was ever made. Not that it isn’t stylishly atmospheric but it doesn’t seem to have a reason for being. Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciarán Hinds top the cast list but the bulk of the film is, in every sense, carried by Jessica Chastain, Marton Csokas and Sam Worthington as the younger incarnation of their characters. The true story is dourly violent whilst at the same time the film adopts the style of classic Nazi-on-the-run thrillers like Marathon Man (1976). And though it takes on the manner of a moral drama what, in a large sense, it wants to say is far from apparent. When you consider that is a remake of a 2007 Israeli film, Ha-Hov, you’ve got to ask why?. One can see that there are interesting ideas to do with justice and revenge raised here but director John Madden and writers Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan don’t bring them to life in an emotionally affecting way.

The principal flaw that stymies the film is that it fails to reconcile its temporal bifurcation. The narrative initially oscillates between the characters as they were 1966 and what they are in 1997 before settling down to tell us what happened back then. The Cold War part of the film is easily its best part with the kidnap and the subsequent imprisonment of the Nazi war criminal and the effects of the experience on the 3 young agents well realized by Madden and his performers. The structural problem that the film fails to redress is that 30 years on they’re estranged or in the case of David, simply absent and nothing holds them together but their unspoken secret. The matching of players is not particularly well done, with no recognizable continuity of personality and accents all over the shop (particularly that of Tom Wilkinson).  As a consequence the involvement we had with the younger players simply evaporates. A further problem ensues with a coda that has Rachel reinventing herself as an espionage agent. She’s both improbably good at it and improbably bad and had the film-makers jettisoned this twaddle to concentrate on the legacy of the kidnapping on the characters The Debt might have really been something.

As it is, although potentially appealing, it is a thriller weighed down by its real life roots and a real life drama that gets waylaid by its thriller form  

 

 

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