Helen Mirren The Debt Hollywood Movie Review

Staringt:Helen Mirren ,Tom Wilkinson ,Jessica Chastain,Marton Csokas ,Sam Worthington,Jesper Christensen,Ciarán Hinds ,Brigitte Kren,Romi Aboulafia,Tomer Ben David ,Ohev Ben David,Jonathan Uziel,Eli Zohar,Irén Bordán Directer: John Madden
Story:
Three young Israeli military personnel (Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, Marton Czokas) are assigned to find and bring to justice the Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), known as the "Surgeon of Birkenau" for his inhumane genetic experiments on Jewish children and babies in the concentration camps. As their plans fall into place, they start running into problems as a love triangle forms between them, something that Vogel is more than happy to exploit against them. Decades later, secrets they've kept hidden about the mission threaten to resurface and Rachel, the only woman on the mission (played in present-day by Helen Mirren) must deal with it.
Analysis:
A time-spanning thriller involving Mosaad agents and Nazi war criminals might not seem like the most exciting prospect for a film until you realize that this one was conceived by Matthew Vaughn and his writing partner Jane Goldman ("Kick-Ass" "X-Men: First Class"), which does add an unexpected level of cool to what might normally be a rather stodgy affair.
As it opens, we're introduced to the three main characters arriving in Israel in 1965 after the conclusion of their mission, two rugged men and a pretty younger woman with a bandage covering the side of her face. We then flash-forward over forty years to an older woman with a nasty scar on her cheek that makes it obvious this is the same woman. She's Rachel Singer, recruited from the secretarial pool for a mission accompanying two Israeli soldiers to East Berlin to play an important role in their mission to catch a Nazi war criminal. In the late '90s, Sarah, the daughter of two of the agents is releasing a book documenting the mission that brought her parents together with a third soldier, David Peretz, as the trio's past has returned to haunt them.
The Debt" has problems with its pacing as it attempts to tell concurrent stories in past and present, but Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain give such fantastic performances in their respective timelines, it ultimately works quite well in terms of drama and suspense.