The Debt review
John Madden's Mossad agent thriller starring Helen Mirren fails to find its balance between past and present, despite a strong cast and an interesting premise The Debt is a period thriller told in two chunks. We open in Tel Aviv in 1997, where the daughter of two ex-Mossad agents (Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson) is launching a book venerating the mission on which her parents met: the celebrated capture of a Nazi war criminal in 1960s Berlin. Director John Madden ( Shakespeare in Love , Killshot ) then moves the action back to 1966 to tell the story of the agents’ pursuit and capture of “the surgeon of Birkenau” in Cold War Germany. It’s this 1966 slice where the film sparks with an engaging premise, an atmospheric

