Review: The Debt

Retired Mossad agent Rachel (Helen Mirren, who played a retired CIA agent in “RED”) is proud of her daughter for writing a nonfiction book. Its subject is a secret operation initiated in 1965 in East Berlin. Rachel is not at all proud of a fictional ending she and her fellow operatives (Marton Csokas and Sam Worthington) invented to explain why they did not bring the “Surgeon of Birkenau” (Jesper Christensen) to Israel to stand trial for his war crimes. Charges would have included his blinding children in experiments to change their eye color. It’s time to correct the record, if not make a case. John Madden ably directs “The Debt,” a thriller with generic complications of lovers in the workplace and good killer versus bad killer moralizing. Screenwriters Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (“X-Men First Class”) and Peter Straughan stick to the dual timelines that effectively link 1965 and 1966, with 1997 of the original 2007 Israeli film “Ha-Hov.” Improvements include such details as enlarging a facial scar Rachel acquired in the line of duty, and replacing a lovely piano in the agents’ rundown Berlin apartment with a badly-tuned instrument with broken keys. The covert action is compelling enough, though the rationalizing is less so when the agents assure themselves that “we are not animals” and that their target “is not a human being,” as they opt to “remember what we are, remember what we are not.” With Jessica Chastain, Ciarán Hinds, Tom Wilkinson. 113m. (Bill Stamets)