It’s easy to see an espionage thriller as a simple exercise in “good vs. bad.” These sorts of films often feature highly-skilled patriots on dangerous missions for their country.
John Madden’s “The Debt” tries to strip away some of this glamour and show that the mythology of heroes is sometimes written by the heroes themselves.
The movie’s story follows three Israeli Mossad agents, Rachel (Helen Mirren), Stephan (Tom Wilkinson), and David (Ciaran Hinds) who are considered heroes in their home country for hunting down and killing an infamous Nazi surgeon in East Berlin some 30 years earlier.
However, it soon becomes clear that some elements of the supposedly heroic mission happened quite differently.
“The Debt” successfully builds tension by jumping between the young version of the agents carrying out their task in 1966, and their aged and scarred selves in 1997.
This allows details about their mission to slowly be revealed, and one perspective alone is never to be trusted.
Though the film contains numerous established actors, there’s no mistaking that the movie belongs to the character Rachel Singer, portrayed by Mirren and in her younger form by Jessica Chastain.
It is through her eyes that we are actually able to feel the mounting psychological torment of the trio’s task, and her scenes with the elderly and seemingly innocuous Nazi war criminal are downright chilling.
But the movie stumbles in its final act, sending a now somewhat infirm Mirren on a mission of vengeance that seems simply implausible and does nothing for the story. It’s a drastic tonal shift more akin to a Bond film and it robs the climax of the excitement it deserves.
