The Debt Review
By David Kempler
Partially Paid Debt
"The Debt" imagines a what-if scenario where three young Israelis from Mossad set off in the mid-1960s to bring a Mengele-type Nazi concentration camp doctor to justice. Rachel (Jessica Chastain), Stephan (Marton Csokas), and David (Sam Worthington) are the Mossad agents and their mission takes them to Communist East Berlin. The plan is to capture Dr. Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), who is practicing as a physician, and bring him back to Israel to stand trial for war crimes.
The plan doesn't go as planned, however. They botch the job, not once, but twice. The first time is not really their fault. His abduction goes smoothly, but their attempt to smuggle him out of the country falls apart at a train station, when external forces snag their plan. This incident forces them to take him back to their apartment until another method of smuggling him out can be devised. The second time they blow it in a way that seems hard to believe for Mossad agents. It's New Years Eve and Stephan and David go to a New Years Eve party, leaving Rachel alone. Vogel escapes, in a difficult-to-imagine scene. Their solution to this embarrassment is to concoct a story that has them killing him. They then return to Israel as great heroes.
One of the problems of "The Debt" is that it jumps from one time period to another so often that at times you aren't certain about what is happening when. When the plot shifts to the present, we see the Mossad agents as different actors. Helen Mirren is Rachel, Tom Wilkinson is Stephan, and Ciarán Hinds is David. When they are on the screen I felt like I was watching an entirely different film, and as talented as the actors are, the plot they are enactingborders on farce. Suffice to say that the senior Rachel is tasked once again with finding, and this time executing, the good doctor.
The final confrontation between Mirren and the doctor made me burst out laughing at one point because it reminded me of a "Family Guy" episode where the elderly perverted neighbor gets in a slow motion fight to the death with an elderly man he recognizes as a Nazi he knew from his wartime past.
Despite problems I had with it, the acting is excellent all-around and there are some scenes that held me well. At times it was borderline great, but then it would trail back off into mediocrity. Somewhere in "The Debt" is a great movie trying to break out. Either holes in the story or poor editing, or both, ensure that this debt remains only partially paid.
