The Debt Review

[Westside Steve]

The Debt

Focus

R 104 min

 

Well, here’s a style of film that bears scrutiny. It’s one of those that have enough gravitas to make critics second guess their first reactions. That is serious actors, serious subject matter and a serious moral so it might be easy to overlook the fact that it falls a bit short as a film.

Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson are the heavyweights that lead the bill, but it’s soon apparent that because most of the film is in flashback mode the younger players, Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington and Marton Csoncas actually do the heavy lifting.

Essentially THE DEBT is part espionage thriller, part romance and part morality play with a heavy patina of melodrama.

The film starts in the late 1990s as Rachel Singer (Mirren, Chastain), a former Mossad (the Israeli special ops force) agent is to be the heroine in a book chronicling a “mission impossible” assignment that went awry some thirty years before.

She and her partners David (Ciaran Hinds/Worthington) and Stefan (Wilkinson/Csoncas) have captured a particularly loathsome escaped Nazi who bears a striking resemblance to real life Mengele to be returned to stand trial for war crimes.

During his captivity the film begins to blur the lines between good and evil and forces the “heroes” to wonder if their cause is actually pure, much less justified.

That problem is compounded by the fact that the story we’ve been told isn’t what really happened, a secret that the three have kept for three decades. To complicate that, David, once thought to have been dead, returns to reopen not only the story but also the long suppressed love triangle. When a reporter threatens to blow the lid off the story, the three must decide what is right.

There are no black and white choices, no easy answers and no way to escape great pain no matter what solution is chosen.

It’s all very thought provoking but made less satisfying by a few things.

First the pacing is deadly slow and takes quite a while to arouse any interest at all. That’s not helped by the over the top brooding of all the actors involved except the evil Nazi doctor.

That all adds to the weight of the permeating morality that leaches most of the excitement the film may have had.

It’s certainly a class production but too often akin to taking your medicine.

C+

 

WSS

Email westsidesteve@aol.com