The Debt (John Madden, 2011)

A rather slapdash remake of an Israeli film of the same time, The Debt places a lot of faith in the ability of heavyweights such as Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson to elevate humdrum material to greater resonances, and mostly fails. The subject matter of Mossad Nazi-hunters isn't too fresh to begin with, and has been handled to more complex or visceral effect by many others, including Spielberg's Munich, and while the junior versions of the leads cope gamely with the tensions around capturing a death camp doctor in East Berlin in the '60s, the evil spiels of the villain of the piece feel recycled and the agonising of the characters in the modern day about having lied with regard to the fate of their prey is flimsy. Then, just as it seems that the finale will at least be mercifully ambivalent, it has to go action film OTT instead.

4/10