I don’t entirely disagree with Roger Ebert’s assessment, in his review of The Debt, that “the film jumps the rails towards the end.” The last sequence is highly unbelievable on several levels — the timing; the consistency of the security; the fight prowess, even adrenalized, of two senior citizens — but by that point, the viewer wants an ending, any ending, narrative closure. My issue with the story is different, so for me, it’s not that the movie jumps the rails in the last third; it’s that that’s where the central problem became clearest.

In a nutshell, the Mossad commissioned a daring undercover operation in 1965 Berlin: identify Dr. Dieter Vogel, “the surgeon of Birkenau,” now living and practicing under a different name; kidnap him; and bring him back to Israel for trial. It doesn’t go quite according to plan, but Vogel is brought to justice. Or…is he? The “present-day” segments, set in 1997, question the sequences we’ve seen before, and whom we should root for in the narrative.

I don’t have a problem with Keyser-Soze-ing a plot for an emotional payoff, but the payoff isn’t achieved anywhere in the film. This is a top-notch group of actors, on both sides of the timeline (well, Sam Worthington isn’t setting any benchmarks, but he gets it done), and yet they still don’t do much to sell either the repulsion of dealing with Vogel, or the weight they’ve carried in the years since the operation. The young Rachel must visit Vogel in her undercover guise for a GYN exam, and Jessica Chastain is good, but the audience feels Vogel more as a garden-variety asshole than as a Nazi war criminal who performed monstrous medical experiments. Stefan (Marton Csokas in the ’60s, looking disconcertingly like Barry “Greg Brady” Williams; Tom Wilkinson in the ’90s) does a good deal of bellowing in both timelines about not letting institutions and people down, but that too comes off somewhat shallowly, as if he’s more concerned with self-promotion than with genuine accomplishment. This is possibly the script’s intent with the character, but it’s not entirely clear.

As a result, the viewer isn’t terribly invested emotionally, and I’m not sure why it doesn’t play as fully as it might; maybe it’s that we don’t spend much time with the characters in the intervening years, except in a we-got-it-thanks scene at a New Year’s Eve party that conveys mostly information we already have, about a love “triangle” we haven’t been given much reason to care about.

That said, The Debt holds interest, and again, the acting is very good despite having nowhere much to go. (It’s fun to see Helen Mirren facing off onscreen again with her fellow Prime Suspect vets Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds.) It’s a thriller, so the fact that it isn’t terribly resonant isn’t per se a problem, but perhaps that’s the problem. It does have depth, but it only goes partway down, and instead of staying on the action surface or investigating the drama shadows, it tries to split the difference, pinning 1997 Stefan and Rachel’s motivations on a daughter who gets like two scenes and whose coattailsing book is a MacGuffin.

On the thriller side, it’s solid, but overall, the movie isn’t great. Mirren is an auto-nom at this point, but we’ve seen better work from her, and though Jesper Christensen as Vogel is outstanding, that’s a tough role to put on the podium (and the Academy just statued Christoph Waltz for it two years ago). Not a waste of time but not a necessity either. Has anyone seen the film it’s based on?

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