Review: The Debt

bill bodkin reviews the new political thriller …

The Debt is a solid movie. It can boast strong performances from the revered Helen Mirren and two rising stars Jessica Chastain (The Help) and Marton Csokas (Kingdom Of Heaven), an interesting moral question and a few twists and turns you didn’t see coming.

However it suffers from two major problems: promising too much in the trailer and then failing to deliver in a compelling manner those aforementioned promises.

The trailer for The Debt promises us a story about how the actions of three ’60s-era Mossad agents, on a mission to capture a Nazi war criminal, has implications so serious that they are about to disrupt their lives in the ’90s. The strong cast of Mirren, Chastain, Csokas, Sam Worthington, Ciaran Hinds and Tom Wilkinson along with this air of mystery the trailer has created, really piques your interest to near mountainous proportions.

So, since the payoff for the film is the big reveal of what “the debt” actually is, naturally the film’s dramatic center is based on the build up to the eventual reveal. You would expect the build to be so tense that when the big reveal happens you’ll be blown away. Think the Keyser Soze conceit in The Usual Suspects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFp28r9sqUw

And here in lies the problem. The build to the big reveal takes way, way too long and told in an unneccessarily long manner. We’re given way too many scenes of Sam Worthington trying to emote and walking away before he speaks a word. Too many scenes of the agents feeding with their prisoner and silently listening to him berate them. The pace grinds to a near standstill, the story going nowhere and then — we get the big reveal.

There’s no drama, there’s no “wow” moment when we find out what “the debt” is. It’s more of a “that’s what we’ve been waiting for?” reaction. And that kills all of the good things that The Debt has going for it. And once we get the reveal it seems as though the film desperately tries to recapture the audience’s interest by reintroducing Helen Mirren back into the film and trying to tie the loose ends up. Luckily, Mirren’s superior acting ability prevents the film’s ending from seeming too rushed or forced.

In the end, The Debt could have been an excellent film, a taught political thriller with a great reveal. The simple solution to this problem would’ve been chopping at least 15 minutes out of the first half of the film. If the pacing had been a little tighter, this could’ve been a film we’d be talking about during Oscar season.