The Debt (2011)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

The movie is supposed to be on the death camp doctor Joseph Mengele and the Mossad attempt to capture him, the sterling performances by Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain do not make up for glaring omissions in the plot. No scenes were depicted of what Vogel (Mengele) got upto in the concentration camps, in fact no scenes depicted in camps at all, so no context or background is indicated. The movie builds up to quite a crescendo in the end, then falls dead flat without any conclusion at all at the end, which is a complete anticlimax.

I usually like tense spy thrillers, but I was seriously disappointed by this one. The "real" action takes place in 1965, when three Mossad agents work in East Berlin to apprehend a Nazi criminal.Contrary to Mossad's reputation, these are the worst agents, ever. Two young men and a woman (Rachel, played by Chastain) who get entangled in a sex triangle and mess up their mission, because they are too busy with their cavorting.Besides being unprofessional in their behavior, they are also easily influenced by the Nazi criminal, turned into hostage. If it was me, I could not care less about the babbling of a criminal Nazi, but these three Jew agents listen to him as if he was the oracle of Delphi.Back to the future, in 1995, their dirty little secret is almost out in the open. The escaped Nazi is going to give an interview to an Ukranian newspaper. Therefore, the woman (older Rachel, played by Mirren) is sent to Ukraina to silence him for good. The movie ends with a geriatric denouement. Whatever is achieved falls into the category of "too little, too late". I seriously hope real agents are made of better stuff than these three. Also, spy movies deserve more engaging characters.

A spy film without American spies involved is always a good start.The story revolves around three Mossad agents two men and a woman and the mission they carried out. It's set in two time lines the time of east Germany and present day where the daughter of the woman has written a book about the spy life of her mother and the mission that made them infamous.I'd recommend this if you enjoyed Munich and tinker tailor soldier and spy. While the two mentioned films focus on more spy double crosses and mysteries. This is more of a drama revolving around the event and the layers of lies it involved. The acting by the two set of actors (different actors on the two different time lines) is brilliant and you feel touched. It is possible to feel or at least understand the circumstances, the risk and above the uncertainty involved undertaking these missions.The drama does not only show spies as spies but people, something the American's (Show) has able to achieve. It does get slow in parts and predictable in others. If you are looking to see a great spy film, I'd say go for Munich or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy but if you're looking for a drama where the cast of characters happen to be spies this is a good watch.

The first hour of The Debt suggested that this movie was going to be another Manichean moral tale with the good Mossad agents tracking down the evil Nazi so that he could be brought to justice. The tone and quality were reminiscent of something from Lifetime TV channel. It seemed overly heavy and super serious and more educational than entertaining. Which is not to say that movies relating to the Holocaust and its aftermath should be a barrel of laughs. (I, for one, found Life is Beautiful to be highly distasteful and inappropriate.)Because this movie was so slow moving, I actually saved the second half for the following night. That's already a red flag: not a fast-paced suspense thriller. In fact, The Debt does not really become a thriller until the second half of the film, when it finally emerges that what we really have here is an essay on truth and lies. The dominant theme becomes an examination of what the fear of sullying one's reputation can drive one to do. At this juncture, the potential for something wonderful and profound suddenly comes into view. I was fully prepared to forgive and forget the plodding opening in anticipation of what was yet to come.Unfortunately, the final quarter of the movie takes a turn for the worse, descending ultimately into something close to a slasher genre film. A senescent slasher genre film, to be more precise, given the advanced age of the protagonists. Really, the gore is completely overdone and the circumstances which conspire to make the gore possible are utterly preposterous. The primary positive take away from this production was that it did not fulfill its initial Manichean promise, thankfully. The human-all-too-human quality of Mossad agents and Nazis alike is highlighted rather than the childish "We are good, and they are evil" trope, of which I, for one, have had quite enough.A couple of final technical gripes: Jessica Chastain's accent was annoying, and as far as I know microformat cameras did not exist in the 1960s. Did they plug that little SIM-card-sized device into a laptop computer to retrieve the necessary data? Don't think so.