Suspense. R. 1 hour, 51 minutes. At area theaters.
“The Debt” is the first movie in which Hollywood “It” actor Sam Worthington shows us what all the fuss was about pre-“Terminator,” pre-“Avatar” and pre-“Clash of the Titans.” As a guilt-ridden Holocaust survivor- turned-Mossad agent determined to bring a war criminal to justice, Worthington suggests vulnerability and layers of character that none of his action blockbusters allowed him to.
“The Debt,” a very good 2007 Israeli thriller with Cold War and Holocaust connections, earns a nerve-wracking and entertaining Hollywood remake.
As in the original film, the new John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love”) version has two settings — Germany in 1965, Israel in 1997. We see Israeli spies attempt to kidnap a man they identified in the mid-’60s as a former Nazi concentration-camp doctor, and we see the Mossad agents who carried out that mission deal with its consequences years later.
“The Surgeon of Birkenau” (Jesper Christensen) was working under an assumed name as a gynecologist. That’s why Rachel (Jessica Chastain) was part of that 1960s team. New to espionage, she had to climb into the stirrups and set the trap for this man they wanted to take back to Israel for trial.
“I want the world to watch,” the idealistic David (Worthington) says. “I want them to know what he did.”
Stephan (Marton Csokas) is the leader of the team, less interested in ideology than the mission.
We see them prepare for it in a dumpy Berlin apartment and memorize their fake identities. Every time new patient Rachel sees the doctor, his chilly bedside manner includes suspicious questions: “Who recommended me? Where did you come from?”
Chastain, of “The Help” and “The Tree of Life,” is superb at suggesting the horror and revulsion she must hide. She has seen the photos of the “Surgeon’s” cruel handiwork.
But things go wrong with the kidnapping, as we know from the film’s present-day framework. The older Rachel (Helen Mirren), David (Ciáran Hinds) and Stephan (Tom Wilkinson) have been feted as heroes for decades. Madden’s film shows us the “official” version of those events and then spends an hour in a flashback, showing what really happened and how the modern-day trio are dealing with it.
Csokas does the best job of back-engineering, brilliantly mimicking Wilkinson’s intonations. Worthington and Hinds mesh nicely, too. Mirren and Chastain suggest the same flintiness.
What really dazzles here are the action beats — the getaway gone wrong, the shocking moments of violence.
Having two Oscar winners, along with the formidable Hinds and Csokas, the emerging Chastain and “Avatar” star Worthington, finally in a part worthy of a little acting effort, make this “Debt” pay off.
