God doesn't plant car bombs.

The Debt

(2010)

John Madden’s film about Mossad Nazi hunters is reasonably compelling when dealing with the 1967 abduction of the Surgeon of Birkenau in East Berlin. The plan, and the fall-out of the failure to transport him out of the city, makes for gripping, claustrophobic cinema.

And the performances of the quartet of players are top notch; Jessica Chastain is as good as you’d expect, while Jesper Christensen’s Nazi doctor only occasionally falls prey to blunderingly obvious dialogue. Martin Csokas is also strong, but the surprise is the sensitive playing of Sam Worthington, who usually comes across as a complete plank.

Less successful is the 1997 framing device, even though it is blessed with more experienced thesps (Tom Wilkinson, Helen Mirren and – ridiculously – Ciaran Hinds as the older Worthington). The plot veers off in a credulity-stretching direction and, despite one edge-of-the-seat sequence, results in the film as a whole feeling much less effective than if it had remained in the Cold War era.

***

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No matter how innocent you are, or how hard you try, they’ll find you guilty.

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The Wind and the Lion (1975) (SPOILERS) John Milius called his second feature a boy’s-own adventure, on the basis of the not-so-terrified responses of one of those kidnapped by Sean Connery’s Arab Raisuli. Really, he could have been referring to himself, in all his cigar-chomping, gun-toting reactionary glory, dreaming of the days of real heroes. The Wind and the Lion rather had its thunder stolen by Jaws on release, and it’s easy to see why. As polished as the picture is, and simultaneously broad-stroke and self-aware in its politics, it’s very definitely a throwback to the pictures of yesteryear. Only without the finger-on-the-pulse contemporaneity of execution that would make Spielberg and Lucas’ genre dives so memorable in a few short years’ time.

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Cold War (2018) (SPOILERS) Pawel Pawlikowski’s elliptical tale – you can’t discuss Cold War without saying “elliptical” at least once – of frustrated love charts a course that almost seems to be a caricature of a certain brand of self-congratulatorily tragic European cinema. It was, it seems “ loosely inspired ” by his parents (I suspect I see where the looseness comes in), but there’s a sense of calculation to the progression of this love story against an inescapable political backdrop that rather diminishes it.

The game is rigged, and it does not reward people who play by the rules.

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What do they do, sing madrigals?

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They literally call themselves “Decepticons”. That doesn’t set off any red flags?

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That’s what people call necromancer’s weather.

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You don’t know anything about this man, and he knows everything about you.

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Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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