The Debt

Directed by John Madden. Starring Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington, Marton Csokas, Ciarán Hinds, Tom Wilkinson, Jessica Chastain 15A cert, gen release, 113 min

THIS THRILLER from the workmanlike John Madden asks us to swallow a great deal. We are expected to believe that a group of Mossad agents could, when put under stress, behave more like Viz's Pathetic Sharks than crack undercover operatives. We are urged to buy into old-school caricatures of cackling Nazis.

Most implausibly, The Debtsuggests that the ravages of time could change three modern-looking young movie stars into the entirely unaccommodating forms of Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds and Tom Wilkinson.

One can just about buy Sam Worthington as a younger Hinds. The notion of Jessica Chastain as a callow Mirren requires serious scrunching of optical nerves. But meaty, Slavic Marton Csokas as an embryonic Wilkinson? Why not just cast Justin Bieber and have done with it?

At any rate, set those things aside and you will, most likely, savour a pretty decent entry to the Nazi- hunter genre. Beginning in muddled, unfocused fashion, The Debtrests inside a pair of narrative bookends set in 1997. The three agents, now middle-aged, are honoured in Israel for their achievement in tracking down the so-called Surgeon of Birkenau during the early 1960s.

Having captured the villain in East Berlin, the gang somehow allowed him to break free and were apparently forced to shoot him as he fled. But the aging colleagues seem uneasy about the adulation. An early crisis sets Mirren thinking about the adventure. Cue a long flashback.

Using a limited budget to good effect, Madden constructs a convincing version of Cold War Berlin. Rain plops through cracked ceilings. Food is both inedible and unidentifiable. The suffocating murk adds dull colour to a film that builds its tension very effectively.

Rarely at home to humour, The Debtmakes sure to remind us that this generation of Israelis was still directly connected to the Holocaust. Both personal grief and ideological conviction drives the troubled agents.

Still, the sober undercurrents of The Debt(remade from a 2007 Israeli film) do not lessen its determination to offer rollicking thrills of the middle order. It becomes even less plausible as it progresses, but it is never anything other than gripping.