The Debt: Review By slysnide

National Geographic ran a miniseries not long ago about Mossad agents chasing down Nazi fugitives around the world. The real agents were interviewed with flashbacks filmed while they narrated. It was a great series since it was real, and ironically featured more nail biting suspense than this film.

The story follows three Mossad agents (Jessica Chastain, Marton Csokas, Sam Worthington) as they sneak into Berlin in 1965 to kidnap a Nazi scientist (Jesper Christensen) for trial in Israel. However, of the few things that go awry, one thing forces them to tell a lie which they never reveal, and thirty-two years later they find themselves facing it again. So the story is essentially told in three acts, the first being in 1997 when we learn their past mission is about to come back to haunt them, then the second act comprises a significant chunk of screen time as they run into a few suspense less problems and get on each other's nerves while on the mission in 1965, and the third act comprises their resolve to find a resolution to their problem back in 1997. Once again, the suspense is very low when it needed to be very heightened. And no, contrary to what it may sound like, this isn't a time travel movie.

Marketing didn't work in favor of this film, having heavily advertised Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, and Christensen as the leads, virtually leaving out the fact that nearly half the film--or at least what seemed like it--featured different cast members. So going into it I and the audience expected to see a thriller featuring Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson as the show runners, but instead get a very slow paced drama with so much realism that it's too boring to get excited about. For why watch a fictional story about something of which happened--or almost happened--numerous times in the sixties and seventies when you can watch a doc*mentary with the real people in even more nail biting scenarios?

Another problem was the fact that the whole second act was just the three agents getting on each other's nerves over petty issues. Their hostage eggs them on every now and then, even reiterating a few points that the real hostages relayed to their captors as the real Mossad agents mentioned in the doc*mentaries, which was interesting. However, the slow pace and lack of intriguing drama between the three agents makes it drag on too long. And of course there's no subplots in the story, whereas the third act on the other hand was suspenseful, but not for the right reasons. It wasn't so much that the truth would come out that got you interested, so much as that our hero was about to be caught red handed.

Overall, this was a slow paced borefest with a nice open ending which left a few possibilities, but the real doc*mentaries were far more interesting. For one swap Berlin for Brazil and the political nightmare one would find themselves in trying to safely extract a Nazi there. Not to mention having to befriend and stalk your prey for weeks to be certain everything goes according to plan--which the characters didn't even bother with--only to have things go awry on the night of. And then cap it off with a nonstop flight from Rio to Israel on a plane built to land in Morocco for refueling. So yeah, try that on for size over this, plus three or four other things I didn't mention and you've got real suspense. For the agents in this film didn't even seem that competent. And there wasn't any real sense of foreboding like there was in the real events. So I don't know what they were trying to accomplish here with this remake, but they missed all the fine points of tension and suspense. And the fact that you get that from a doc*mentary rather than a film tells you there's some problems with the script.