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Friday, October 7, 2011
MOVIE REVIEW
The Debt
Avenging The Past Through A Jagged,
Tortured Present
Helen Mirren as Mossad operative Rachel Singer in John Madden's "The Debt".
Focus Features/Laurie Sparham
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Friday,
October 7, 2011
A recent release still in theaters, "The
Debt" is a well-intended thriller that has its priorities scattered. John
Madden's choppy film is unsure of what it wants to be as it vacillates between
thriller, romance and espionage revenge drama. Based on an Israeli film
("Ha-Hov" aka The Debt) released just four years ago, "The Debt" is top-heavy,
boasting an eclectic though miscast group of international actors.
Helen Mirren, taut, expressive and powerful here,
headlines "The Debt" as Rachel Singer, the leader of a Mossad spy operation
tracking down a still-roaming Nazi criminal Dieter Vogel, nicknamed the Butcher
Of Birkenau (Jesper Christensen) who murdered many including members of her
family.
Filmed in Budapest, the United Kingdom and
Tel Aviv, "The Debt" flashes back and forward between the 1960s and the present
as Jessica Chastain plays the younger Rachel.
Ms. Chastain's fellow youthful Mossad cohorts are
Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas ("The
Tree").
The trio track the elusive
unrepentant killer Vogel but along the way confront moral and ethical obstacles
that become a greater challenge than the mission itself.
Mr. Madden ("Shakespeare In Love") demonstrates a
know-how when mining the drama that dilemma and irony are made of.
He earnestly explores whether the appetite for
justice becomes irrelevant or superfluous when the means to obtaining it are
blurred by extralegal measures or extreme violence.
He also offers a somewhat tentative look at the complexity of feelings, some of
those romantic, others fraternal.
For a while "The Debt" has some currency,
yet the director and his cast of talented performers take on the film's
intriguing issues and premises only intermittently, and Mr. Madden's wayward
directorial flourishes obstruct what could have been a compelling drama.
Instead, "The Debt" is a self-distracting drama
and an irritating experience. Stylistically unsettled and restless, "The
Debt" has unexpected edits in places that remove the viewer from it. The
result is a forced atmosphere that feels hollow. Style, not the film's
principal villain, is the true enemy and obstacle for Mr. Madden in "The Debt",
and the schizophrenic tonal shifts obstruct the path of a story unevenly written
and developed by
"Watchmen" and
"X-Men: First
Class" director Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan.
As for the rest of the cast, Ciarán Hinds
and Tom Wilkinson are remarkably ineffectual as older versions of Mr.
Worthington and Mr. Csokas's characters respectively, which, for actors of their
high caliber is a first. To be fair, it's more that both veteran actors
are casualties of a film that trafficks in glossy art-house schlock, trapped in
a film that hardly deserves their talents. As such they look oddly out of
place, as if they don't know what to do with themselves.
"The Debt", which on paper promises much, wants to be intrepid and high-minded
but winds up being neither.
Furthermore, the brunette-haired Ms. Chastain-as-Rachel is an unintended source
of actress-identity syndrome in "The Debt".
I spent the entire two
hours and 14 minutes of this jagged ordeal trying to determine whether I was
watching
Claire Danes or
Ms. Chastain
as the younger Rachel Singer. (In an admitted state of profound ignorance,
I sincerely hadn't known of Ms. Chastain's involvement, or must have blinked too
much, too fast or too hard at the credits.) And when you find yourself
constantly thinking about which actor it is you are watching throughout a movie,
let alone a thriller whose goal it is to absorb and engage you, that's usually
not a good sign.
All in all, "The Debt" is a self-conscious work that tries to do far too much
with way too little. Overcompensations are made for a story that doesn't
have the staying power it should, and ultimately the drama wanes and disappears
into a meaningless ether. "The Debt" opened right at the
unofficial end
of the summer season (on August 31), and it is one of the summer's
(if not the year's) most disappointing films. I had seen this film back in
July and have only just thought back to how unconvincing a vision it was. I
felt isolated by it and repelled by its expected but strong violence.
Mr. Madden clearly wants to shake things up but instead
of making sure his film was first on solid footing he vigorously shook up "The
Debt" like a washing machine spin cycle when the material needed a more careful,
discerning focus. Rather than being a powerful film that compels, "The
Debt" is a gratuitous, thunderous mess. Sputtering to the finish line it
exhausts, overwrought and out of gas.
With: Romi Aboulafia, Brigitte Kren.
"The Debt" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association Of America for
some language and violence. The film's running time is
two hours and fourteen minutes.
COPYRIGHT 2011. POPCORNREEL.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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