The Debt is the second highly acclaimed Helen Mirren (The Last Station, Gosford Park) movie I watched last month. The first was The Queen, for which she won the Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role Academy Award. I had high expectations for The Queen and was disappointed by it. I found it boring and just not nearly as good as all the critics made it out to be. It also starred Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon, Underworld), who I’m not the biggest fan of. I also had high expectations of The Debt, but they needed to be higher to see the movie in the theater. After watching it at home, seeing it on the big screen would not have been much different. The movie was a good movie that had a reasonably interesting (though not entirely believable) story that held my interest the entire time.

The movie starts in 1997, some 32 years after a trio of agents from Mossad, an Israeli intelligence agency, was sent to East Berlin to kidnap a Nazi war criminal and bring him back to Israel for a trial. In the film’s opening sequence, the three agents (all in their 20’s) are welcomed back to Israel. The young heroes are David (Sam Worthington – Avatar, Terminator Salvation), Rachel (Jessica Chastain – Interstellar, Take Shelter), and Stefan (Marton Csokas – The Bourne Supremacy, Alice in Wonderland). While their mission was to capture Vogel (Jesper Christensen – Melancholia, The Young Victoria), a shameless man known as the Surgeon of Birkenau whose unimaginable procedures on his captives made him a target, the trio comes back without their captive. Instead, they tell the story of how they had held Vogel locked up in an apartment for weeks, awaiting their next order but were forced to kill Vogel as he tried to escape capture. Most of the film involves the young agents, their schemes to capture Vogel, and what to do with him when their plan fails. They know how to follow a mission. They just aren’t equipped to make their own decisions.

A bunch of tangled webs and lies need to be sorted out. The older Rachel, David (Ciaran Hinds – There Will Be Blood, Munich), and Stefan (Tom Wilkinson – Michael Clayton, In The Bedroom) have lived with what happened that night for the past 32 years. And just as the book is being promoted, a new twist to the plot emerges. And it is up to the three older characters to either take care of the situation or face the consequences of what happened 32 years ago in East Germany.

An interesting piece of trivia is that The Debt is one of six movies Chastain starred in 2011. That is four more movies than she had been in before this breakout year. All of these movies except Texas Killing Fields earned a least a 76% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I thought she was brilliant in the underappreciated Take Shelter, a film in which she matched Michael Shannon’s amazing performance scene after scene.

I would recommend seeing this movie.

Plot 8.5/10 (I liked it)
Character Development 8.5/10 (I liked it)
Character Chemistry 7.5/10 (I was slightly less impressed, but it worked for me)
Acting 8/10 (acting helped build the tension, both in the current day and in 1965)
Screenplay 8/10
Directing  8/10
Cinematography 7.5/10
Sound 7.5/10
Hook and Reel 9/10 (I’m going to give a movie at least a nine here if I don’t pause it at any moment to work on something else temporarily)
Universal Relevance 7/10 (seems a little foreign and the situation a tad unbelievable with just the three people who were set out to perform the mission on their own)
79.5%

Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie

• • Munich
  • Bridge of Spies
  • Syriana
  • Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
  • Operation Finale