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“Truth Is a Luxury”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

The Debt is a suspense thriller that shifts between different years, different locations, and even different actors playing the same characters, and the suspense and shocking conclusions to various scenes keep the audience’s attention from start to finish.

The story is about a secret mission conducted in the 1960s by three Israeli secret agents and the consequences of that mission which follow them for the rest of their lives.

The three secret agents are Stephan, David, and Rachel, and their mission is to slip into East Berlin, find and identify a suspected Nazi war criminal, capture him, sneak him out of East Berlin, and then take him back to Israel where he will stand trial for the atrocities he committed in a German concentration camp located in Poland.

Rachel is played by Jessica Chastain back in the Sixties during the mission, and when David mentions to her that she is brave, she says, “I’m not brave. I’m terrified.”

Helen Mirren plays Rachel in the present-day scenes, she still has the facial scar that she received during a bloody fight with their prisoner, and once again she is terrific in this role.

Present-day Rachel has a grown-up daughter who is married and has a son. The daughter has also written a book about the mission that has become a success, and Rachel sometimes reads from the book when her daughter is asked to give talks about the book.

However, there is a secret about the mission, which didn’t exactly go as planned, and as Rachel tells Stephan, Rachel cannot tell her daughter the truth, because it would destroy her daughter.

Eventually we see the details of the mission back in the Sixties, and we also learn the truth. The Nazi war criminal that they are after is working under a different name as a doctor, and Rachel and David pretend to be married and having difficulty conceiving a child.

So, Rachel goes to the doctor for help and has to experience the humiliation, embarrassment, and horror of being examined by him while the agents put their plan into action and finally abduct him.

What happens next is the consequences they have to face in the present.

The Debt shows that the truth is a luxury, it plays with the audience, and the shocks keep coming until the very end.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”