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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Directed by The Other John Madden\u2014as in the clunkily tasteful Brit best known for Shakespeare in Love, not the NFL's gift to video-game boo-yah\u2014The Debt is the kind of semi-chic, semi-earnest, all-Hollywood confection that stays entertaining in inverse proportion to whether you buy its bungled aspirations to seriousness. Because marquee wonders never cease, Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, and Ciaran Hinds play three grizzled veterans of the Mossad, Israel's renowned intelligence service. But Rachel, Stephan, and David share a guilty secret\u2014and no, it isn't that all three distinguished stars are about as convincingly Jewish as fish and chips for Passover. \n\n While I haven't seen the Israeli film The Debt is based on, it's a safe bet the original cast was a tad more authentic. It's an equally safe one that the plot's historical ironies were a mite more, you know, informed, but bite isn't Madden's strong suit. What could have been\u2014and for all I know, was\u2014a fairly sharp movie about Israel's unconcluded relationship with Nazism's ghosts has been mulched instead into another of Madden's hapless ercises in Oscar bait. And since Oscar bait doesn't usually open on August 31st after sitting on the shelf since Christmas or so, presumably someone at Miramax thinks the same.\n\n The main cause for regret is that this story could have gone over like gangbusters in defter hands than his. In the mid-1960s, as the backstory has it, Rachel, Stephan, and David became national heroes after successfully kidnapping a notorious Nazi war criminal known as \"The Surgeon of Birkenau,\" then killing him in the nick of time as he was about to evade Israeli justice. Shades of a post-Holocaust version of John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, though: The legend is just that, no more. The messy truth is in play once we meet the trio's youthful editions on the actual, fouled-up mission\u2014respectively, The Tree of Life's Jessica Chastain (pretending to be Mirren a.k.a. Rachel), Avatar alum Sam Worthington (David a.k.a. Hinds), and Marton Csokas (Wilkinson a.k.a. Stephan).\n\n If you've got a weakness for this kind of Old Self/Young Self matchup, the cross-generational casting has its charms. After all, Chastain would probably give her publicist's left arm to end up down the road with Mirren's Wikipedia entry, and Mirren\u2014despite being the sexiest 66-year-old since Marlene Dietrich quit tucking herself into sequined gowns\u2014probably wouldn't turn up her ultra-eloquent nose at an offer from Mephistopheles to swap birthdates. No less enjoyable is watching the unknown but dynamic Csokas's performance as an ambitious young hothead play calendar hopscotch with one of Wilkinson's best ultra-familiar variations on a corrupted old blowhard 30 years past his prime. \n\n Set in East Berlin, where the quarry\u2014played by Danish actor Jesper Christensen, as if to ensure that no actual Israelis or Germans will distract us\u2014has made a new life for himself as an, ahem, obstetrician, the kidnapping itself is the best part of the movie. Naturally, given the ex-Birkenau surgeon's new specialty, Rachel is the one who has to pose as a patient to catch him\u2014and when she's in the examination-room stirrups, the historical truism that Israel owes its birth to the Holocaust's horrors is made uncommonly literal. The wit Tarantino could have brought to pulp symbolism this blunt boggles the mind, but Madden is no Quentin by a long shot. Or David Cronenberg, whose own Holocaust movie is either yet to be made or his whole filmography's unstated given.\n\n Partly because it helps you while away the time, the list of alternative directors just keeps getting longer. Once the raiders' eiltration attempt fails, they're trapped with their target in a Berlin apartment, stewing in their menage a trois juices as their prisoner gains the psychological upper hand: Roman Polanski territory. But the dynamics of sexualized claustrophobia aren't Madden's strong suit either. (If you're wondering by now what his strong suit is, you're not alone\u2014though, he isn't bad with actors.) Because of a shortage of basic directorial map work, like making sure viewers are up to speed on the lair's layout and exits, the dueling versions of what happened in the pivotal sequence of the wanted man's escape don't register as vividly as they should, though the editor, Alexander Berner\u2014who also did The Baader-Meinhof Complex\u2014does his best to keep things suspenseful both times.\n\n Nonetheless, thanks mostly to the Young Self and Old Self casts\u2014not to mention the simple fact that few movies about Israeli self-doubt ever come down the pike at all, Steven Spielberg's Munich aside\u2014The Debt stays reasonably interesting right up to the third act's lurch into burlesque. Once the truth of what happened in 1966 threatens to come out, our lionized threesome steps into action\u2014in the case of Hinds/David, right into oncoming traffic\u2014leaving Rachel and Stephan to cope as they will. \n\n The payoff is far-fetched and muddled at once, and let's just say that watching Mirren perform acts of senior-citizen derring-do in Red is one thing and watching Dame Helen do it to unburden herself of an earlier Israel's belief that settling scores with Hitler's henchmen would exorcise Auschwitz is another. Worse, you could exit The Debt under the impression the movie's point is that all this happened so long ago that only wrangling geriatrics still care\u2014not, I'm guessing, the intention. Call me rude, but I came out praying that somebody messes up and hires Madden's Yank namesake to do the DVD's commentary track."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/tom-carson-the-debt-review>