The Debt

In John Madden's The Debt, three young strangers in 1965 East Berlin seek to find and capture The Surgeon of Birkenau, a ruthless doctor that performed horrific acts on imprisoned Jews during World War II.

The threesome are played by Sam Worthington, Marton Csokas and Jessica Chastain who embody David, Stefan and Rachel respectively in their younger years. Ciarán Hinds, Tom Wilkinson and Helen Mirren play the characters when the film switches between the 1960's to the end of 1999.

The film flips between the thirty year time frame liberally in the first third of the film. We watch as the young David, Stefan and Rachel welcome us to 'The Mission' and follow them through the intricate plot details that, if all goes correctly, will bring the doctor to across the Berlin wall to face trial for his actions. Young Rachel will pose as a patient to gain access to the doctor and when confirmation is received, she will use her special training to subdue the surgeon so that Stefan and David can transport him alive to West Berlin and then back to Israel.

But things don't go according to plan and soon the three are forced to remain in hiding with their prisoner until they can determine a new course of action. It's while cooped up in their apartment that the doctor begins to use mind games in an effort to gain the psychological advantage while revealing the true evil behind his words.

In more modern times, we learn that Rachel and Stefan had both married and divorced. Their daughter has written a book about the abduction and the days that followed in the apartment detailing her parents as heroes to the cause.

But recent developments and an unexpected suicide by David leave Stefan and Rachel in the same position they were 30 years ago. And one must travel back to Europe to seek out someone who claims to be the original Surgeon of Birkenau.

John Madden is no stranger to award winning dramas. Shakespeare in Love won out over Saving Private Ryan and Ethan Frome was a well received romance back in 1993. Madden works the camera like a maestro in effortlessly weeding the story through multiple decades. The film never loses focus and relies on its strengths – namely the performances of Mirren, Csokas and Chastain – to carry the heavy plot line forward.

However, in the final acts, the story gets a little lost. Watching Mirren head to Kiev, Ukraine was a leap of faith and political, social and moral values begin to choke the life out of what was a better than average thriller up to that point.

With the conclusion of The Debt being too heavy handed to maintain the thin weight of the first ¾, The Debt eventually fails to be the film that showed award promise in the trailers. We are not suggesting that The Debt is a bad film, but its final reel wilt does take away from the execution of its predecessors.

Mirren may still get award recognition come December (the film is officially released December 29th), but it may be a long shot to see The Debt as one of the Best Picture nominees.

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A remake of the 2007 Israeli film of the same name, John Madden's Westernised take on the gritty espionage thriller is enjoyably diverting, if not much more. Tracking three Mossad agents across two timeframes – as young adults they embark on a perilous mission to capture a serial killing Nazi surgeon, 30 years later they revisit their haunted memories – there's plenty going on story-wise. However it lacks that required edge to elevate it into spellbinding territory, largely due to the uninspiring way it's shot and presented. The impressive line-up of actors don't disappoint; Martin Csokas, Sam Worthington and Jessica Chastain gel naturally as the inexperienced spies, whilst Tom Wilkinson, Ciaran Hinds and Helen Mirren add enormous clout as their elderly counterparts. Could've been better, could've been worse; a mixed affair really.

The Debt has several things going for it: an interesting story and some fine performances. It's a pity that the ending was disappointing.

I'd like to commend Helen Mirren on her performance and even though she gets top billing she's not in it much and when she is her performance doesn't merit the top billing. The stars of the movie are undoubtedly the younger characters played by Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington and Martin Csokas for it is with them that the events of 1966 are played out and we get a glimpse of what the trio went through during their mission. Jessica was quite excellent, and demonstrates the stress put on a young and inexperienced agent thrust into East Berlin in the 1960s. Marton, as the leader of the trio, was good and his character was never demanding nor bullying in the way some unit leaders can become. Sam Worthington was competent, and perhaps a little subdued, portraying a shy man with more going on inside his head than he wanted the world to see.

There is a plot twist, which I won't mention, and which was cleverly disguised in the trailers, which provides turns the story on its head and propels the movie towards the end that I found disappointing. If someone waits more than thirty years to develop a guilty conscience, something that was not properly developed for one of the characters, then it makes it difficult to believe that they would go about with their decision in a split second and undo everything they stood for. It made their first early decision to be quite pointless and in the end more damaging to others than for the main characters. Some would argue that the ending was just fine but in movies that's all well and good but in real life it's not as simple as that. So, I felt a little bit let down for a movie that I was very interested in watching.

Is it worth recommending, then? Well, the ending probably won't bother too many people and so it is worth watching as the movie keeps a fine level of tension throughout the movie so you're never to sure which way things are going to go until it occurs.

This espionage thriller is an English-language version of a 2007 Israeli film "Ha-Hov" and it is immediately apparent why an adaptation that will inevitably win a much larger audience was made. This is a gripping tale, intelligently told and cleverly constructed. It is much more exiting than the other spy movie of the summer of 2011 "Tinker Tailor Solider Spy" and a much more authentic representation of the Israeli secret service Mossad than "Munich".

Essentially we have two stories here, set in different times (1965 and 1997) and different locations (Berlin and Israel/Ukraine) but involving the same characters; yet director John Madden - whose first success was the contrasting "Shakespeare In Love" - has done a skillful job in interweaving the two narratives in a manner which requires the viewer to re-evaluate regularly both situations and motivations. The early period works better than the later one and fortunately it accounts for the majority of the film, but this is almost two hours of sustained tension.

Unusually there are seven strong roles in one film. The three Mossad agents Stephan, David and Rachel are played by Marton Csokas, Sam Worthington and Jessica Chastain respectively in the Cold War period and portrayed by Tom Wilkinson, Ciarán Hinds and Helen Mirren respectively in the modern day setting, while the Danish Jesper Christensen is the surgeon of Birkenau throughout the story and gives this profoundly unsympathetic role a subtle psychological dimension.

Although most of these roles are male, it is the two female performances that are especially memorable. Mirren has had a brilliant career and it is wonderful to see her at the top of her game in her sixties, while Chastain seems to have suddenly burst into movies with "The Tree Of Live" and clearly has a major career ahead of her.

The plot of THE DEBT is rather enigmatic and a bit confusing because of the technique of cutting back and forth between past and present. Added to this is an even more problematic factor: the younger and older counterparts don't look a bit alike, so keeping track of them by character names can keep a viewer in a distracted frame of mind.

Other than the script problems, it must be said that the acting is all on a high level, and the story is particularly engaging during the earlier 1967 sequences. This is partly due to the fact that Rachel (Jessica Chastain) gives the most impressive performance in the film and is someone who immediately involves you in the story. She emerges later on into the Helen Mirren image, which is not quite credible in my opinion. Mirren does a fine job as the mature Rachel and her final scenes with the man she has been hunting down is staged realistically with gut-wrenching violence.

If you can get beyond the casting problems involved, the story is taut with suspense but told at a rather leisurely pace.

Tom Wilkinson and Martin Csokas as old and young Stephan; Ciaran Hinds and Sam Worthington as old and young David; and Jesper Christensen as Dr. Vogel give performances that cannot be praised highly enough. The only drawback is that the resemblance between young and old is entirely missing, a fatal flaw when a film is told in cross-cuts between past and present.

Hunting down an ex-Nazi surgeon who has committed war crimes always makes for an interesting story idea...but in this case, there are too many flaws to make the film wholly successful.