The Debt

Rating: 1.5/5

As a proud film buff and Jew, I'm glad that there are more movies about Jews kicking ass. Munich, Inglorious Basterds, Defiance, those movies rock my socks. I have also seen some really good Netflix documentaries about the Mossad, so it's understandable that I was excited to see The Debt. Let me tell you, after actually seing it, I think Mossad agents would be embarrassed at how dumb it makes them look.

Rachel (Jessica Chastain), David (Sam Worthington), and Stephan (Marton Csokas) are three young Mossad operatives inserted into East Berlin in the 60s to capture a Dr. Mengele-type Nazi war criminal (Jesper Christensen) and bring him to trial in Israel. Unfortunately something unrevealed goes wrong with the mission. Thirty years later, the mission is the subject of a book by Rachel's (now Helen Mirren) daughter and the three are national heroes. Suddenly, David (now Ciaran Hinds) kills himself and Rachel and Stephan (now Tom Wilkinson) need to confront their past.

The Debt is dumb. There is literally nothing about the film that is subtle or smart, from the ham-handed pacing to the various accents that come and go as they please. The script by Jane Goldman (X-Men: First Class, Kick Ass) is inconsistent, ludicrous, and nonsensical. For example, older Rachel says that she cannot help older Stephan because she hasn't been an agent in years, and then she ninja-kicks armed guards in the next scene. The characters are kind of developed, but there isn't any sense of time, so when the young agents are getting paranoid from being inside for too long, it's a surprise.

Speaking of the characters, they're all unmemorable stereotypes who are boring and badly acted. Jessica Chastain tries but is given nothing to work with, Marton Csokas just sort of screams at everyone, and Sam Worthington's accent goes from Israeli to Australian and back again within one sentence. Also, when the mission goes wrong, instead of just killing their prisoner, the younger agents keep him alive, feed him three times a day, and let him talk to them. Even when he starts playing them against each other, our highly trained heroes don't gag him.

The Debt is a true disappointment. It could have been a smart thriller with an intelligent script and good direction in the vein of Inside Man. Instead we got another debacle in the vein of Unknown. It doesn't make any sense, the story is ludicrous, the events surrounding the older characters are completely uninteresting. The past is much more compelling, but it's so boring and predictable that there really isn't much effect. There's just no reason to pay to see this film.