John Madden’s Nazi-hunting spy thriller recalls the aphorism, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” The Debt intertwines two stories: a Mossad operation in 1966 East Berlin to arrest the ‘Surgeon of Birkenau’ (a wonderfully malevolent Jesper Christensen); and a postscript, 30 years later, in which the three Israeli agents must finally pay their mission’s ‘debt’.
This narrative’s power depends on conveying lingering guilt and a lasting desire for atonement… but speaking of Atonement, that film had much more convincing casting. It isn’t merely implausible that Sam Worthington somehow morphs into Ciaran Hinds, Marton Csokas into Tom Wilkinson and Jessica Chastain into Helen Mirren – it corrodes The Debt’s crucial relationship between past and present. So, while Mirren is compelling as central character Rachel Singer, Chastain’s scenes don’t seem to inform hers.
The ’60s story is more intriguing. Apart from the satisfying Bondian cocktail of guns, scissor holds, subterfuge and sexual tension, the young spies flounder as their cunning captive unerringly probes their weaknesses. Worthington can’t do an Israeli accent at all, but nonetheless he embodies a simultaneous stolidity and vulnerability that makes him both the team’s weakest link and its moral compass.
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