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80This is real edge-of-your-seat stuff, in a throwback way - no booming special effects, just old-school timing and execution.
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67Perhaps the discrete delegation of the thrills to the 1966 story and the moral quandaries to the 1997 story is what prevents The Debt from congealing as well as it might have. Life is rarely that neat.
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75The film's a potboiler but a gripping one, and it leaves you chewing on both its nuances and implausibilities.
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60Just when many may have thought that Cold War thrillers had gone out of fashion, along comes one to reinvigorate the genre.
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75Madden has the wisdom to give most of the heavy emotional lifting to Mirren, who continues to shine at the age of 66.
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40A strong cast fails to rescue this ponderous Oscar bait.
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63The architecture of The Debt has an unfortunate flaw. The younger versions of the characters have scenes that are intrinsically more exciting, but the actors playing the older versions are more interesting. Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds bring along the weight of their many earlier roles. To be sure, the older actors get some excitement of their own, but by then, the plot has lost its way.
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50Director Madden vacillates between treating the issues and historical context of The Debt seriously, and as the story demands, as pure, heavy-handed pulp. The cast does what it can in the service of this assignment. But some jobs simply resist satisfying completion.
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75Although they might have wished for something less conventional, it's the thrills that make this movie.
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Sep 26, 201160A smart, tense, well-acted thriller undercut by a disappointing finale and an occasional lack of focus. But at least this offers something for those looking for a film with more on its mind than simple set-pieces.
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83The Debt is basically an entertaining riff on "Munich." It's about a (fictional) operation of top secret Israeli revenge, carried out by three highly trained agents whose plan goes off the rails in ways that are more fascinating than the mission itself.
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90Bristling with dangers both corporeal and cerebral, The Debt is a superbly crafted espionage thriller packed with Israeli-Nazi score settling.
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Aug 30, 201160The Debt shortchanges itself severely with the weight it gives the portion of its story set further in the past.
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63There are some nice surprises in store, as well, but the longer Madden's story goes on, the more manufactured things tend to feel.
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60Despite some early whispers of awards potential, The Debt is nothing more than a gritty thriller with a highbrow pedigree.
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61The movie drowns the deeper questions it raises in a sadistic procedural, an endless circular motion of fight scenes whose only justification is themselves.
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75"The Debt," a very good 2007 Israeli thriller with Cold War and Holocaust connections, earns a nerve-wracking and entertaining Hollywood remake.
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75What the three pairs of actors lack in semblance (or resemblance), they make up for to a great extent in their performances.
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75A story like this requires a villain worthy of decades of built up horror and rage, and Christensen provides a thoroughly credible stimulus for the nail-biting events of the film.
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75The acting is superb across-the-board, with the three younger performers deserving accolades.
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63Chastain (a nifty match-up with Mirren) is a live wire, and her scenes with Csokas and Worthington have a spark the later scenes lack. No matter. The Debt holds you in its grip.
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75It is an exciting movie, full of crises and dramatic turns despite an aura of sadness that seems to pervade it.
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63Its performances are resourceful and affecting, with Chastain and Worthington in the past sequences, and Mirren and Wilkinson in the later chapters, exuding a complicated mess of responsibility, guilt, sacrifice, revenge, and regret.
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75The Debt eventually settles into a predictable groove that slightly undercuts its impact. Still, it's a film of ambition and substance.
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83Christensen plays him with Lecter-like intensity; the unsettling calmness of someone capable of anything.
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75Madden's dark, moody, complex exploration of guilt and identity taps into a rich vein of moral ambiguity, but the filmmakers should know that in the face of unspeakable Nazi evil, the romantic problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans.
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63Political thrillers with flawed heroes demand a different potion, one that mixes the grit of reality with the seeds of excitement until they reach a critical mass and explode. In that sense, for all its strengths and good intentions, The Debt owes a debt to the wrong genre – Birkenau wasn't fantasy; too often, this movie is.
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60As a thriller, The Debt performs many if not all the right moves. Where the John Madden-directed film gets into trouble is in wanting to deal with the Holocaust without being entirely a period film.
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70As The Debt grows more complex and suspenseful, it also becomes more literal, losing some of its dramatic intensity.
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50As with Spielberg's "Munich," there is an awkward, irresoluble tension between the movie's urge to thrill and the weighty pull of the historical obligations that it seeks to assume. How much, to be blunt, should we be enjoying ourselves? What do we owe to The Debt? Whatever the sum, it is more than the film itself, gloomy with unease, seems able to repay.
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70The Debt is a little too gray and stolid - by which we may simply mean too true to its complex milieu - to qualify as scintillating entertainment. But at the end of a summer in which anything like reality was banned from movie houses, this gnarly political thriller has a tonic effect
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40Despite the chronological juggling, the film's stylistic debts (a Hitchcock flashback borrowed from Stage Fright, a Bertolucci-esque apartment sequence that could be titled Last Tango in Auschwitz) are simplistic to a fault; they lack the multifaceted suspense and sensuality typified by those directors at their best.
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75With its blend of taut action and profound revelations, The Debt is definitely worth an audience's investment.
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70The remake ups the adrenaline factor, and features strong performances across the board, yet feels bogged down by a weighty love triangle and a subject that merits more than the old-school good vs. evil approach.
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80Predictably, the holes in the narrative set us up for a twist or three, but, in balance, it's a pleasure to be back in the wet alleys and spy-patrolled streets of the GDR, however vague they seem without '60s black-and-white cinematography.
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50Any self-respecting period piece, historical drama or even caper movie - and The Debt is all three - balances issues of global significance with interpersonal drama. The problem here is that the personal eclipses the global. The stakes are too low.
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Aug 30, 201175A more daring script might have found ways to tell the stories in parallel, doling out just enough information to keep viewers involved. But, as it is, The Debt grasps the viewer pretty firmly, delivering thrills without trivializing the moral quandaries that set it in motion.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 26 out of 38
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Mixed: 8 out of 38
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Negative: 4 out of 38
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8This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.