Movie review by Greg Carlson

Locked in a battle for attention with the recent off-screen Oscar telecast tempests that bedeviled uncouth director/loose-lipped homophobe Brett Ratner and star Eddie Murphy, “Tower Heist” is vain and empty-headed. A gruesome casserole of lukewarm B.S., “Tower Heist” is predicated on the notion that a cast headed by multimillionaires playing service sector victims of a Madoff-like pyramid scheme can somehow make all of the poor schmucks in the audience forget their economic woes by fantasizing about sticking it to a penthouse-dwelling fat cat. The only problem: “Tower Heist” is not particularly funny and it is certainly not well-written.

Ben Stiller’s Josh Kovacs is the dedicated majordomo of the Tower, a ritzy New York high rise populated by a parade of odious and well-heeled snobs used to being pampered and fawned over by an army of lowly doormen, maids, cooks, drivers, secretaries and other wage-slaves. Wall Street top dog Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), the swindling one-percenter whose arrest signals bad news for the building staffers who trusted him with their pensions, shares an uneasy master-servant relationship with Kovacs, but the humiliated underling vows revenge. Enlisting childhood acquaintance Slide (Eddie Murphy) in a nonsensical scheme to steal Shaw’s emergency cash fund, Kovacs spends the balance of his time corralling his bumbling team of thieves.

Murphy, whose “streetwise” Slide was touted as a back-to-basics return to form for the veteran comic, or at least a break from fat suits and saccharine “family” films, cannot quite conjure the early 80s spirit of Reggie Hammond or Billy Ray Valentine, and the movie’s PG-13 rating restricts the level of profanity allowed. It is also mildly disappointing to watch Murphy – who hatched the original idea for “Tower Heist” as an all-black caper before seeing it turn into an “Ocean’s Eleven” wannabe – relegated to second banana status.

Ratner’s hollow aping of Reagan-era action comedies steers the film’s aesthetic (or lack thereof), and the central caper, in which the underprepared and uncoordinated protagonists engineer the removal of Shaw’s priceless Ferrari (purportedly once owned by Steve McQueen) during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, chews up the clock in favor of the timely satire promised by the movie’s trailer. “Tower Heist” should have capitalized on capital, but the rooftop swimming pool’s hundred-dollar bill design is as close as the movie gets to any kind of economic commentary. The definition of the class gulf between billionaire Shaw and hustler Slide needed to be razor sharp, not noodle wet.

Ratner constructs the narrative with no sense of momentum, pacing, or even plot, and while the heavily rewritten script (with un-credited contributions from Noah Baumbach for Stiller’s character) does the filmmaker no favors, the failure of “Tower Heist” belongs mostly to its brash director. The plotters, including Matthew Broderick’s schlubby, bankrupt investor, regularly lose track of their outrage at Shaw’s fiduciary malfeasance, and Shaw himself never comes into sharp focus as a true antagonist. Subplots involving Casey Affleck’s defection from the schemers and Tea Leoni’s shapeless romance with Kovacs exist as dull obstacles incapable of generating even the tiniest shred of suspense over the movie’s predictable outcome.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Writer-director Andrew Niccol’s “In Time” returns to the blend of science fiction, politics, and thrills seen in his 1997 cult debut “Gattaca,” but with considerably less punch and effectiveness. Niccol’s interest in social (in)justice as filtered through futurism, fantasy, or speculation has ranged from the critically lauded media critique of “The Truman Show,” which he wrote and produced, to the lousy, vapid, meta-narrative “Simone,” and “In Time” takes its place on his filmography somewhere between those poles. “In Time” hints at a richer, more complex examination of class, temporality, and the value of an individual’s life than the drama that unfolds.

Set in a free market dystopia where time has replaced money as the economy’s essential unit of currency, “In Time” follows the hardscrabble struggle of Will Salas (Justin Timberlake), a blue collar clock-puncher laboring to earn enough minutes to keep himself alive for another day. Luminescent, forearm-embedded countdown timers provide every citizen with urgent memento mori, but wealthy, leisure class moguls bank decades and centuries while ghettoized underclass paupers routinely drop dead when their stopwatches zero out.  Like cash before it, time can be given, taken, traded, hoarded, and stolen.

In a nod to “Logan’s Run,” Niccol appends the premise that genetic engineering switches off physical aging to maintain each person’s physicality at the age of twenty-five, a choice that banishes older actors from the movie but reaps the unintended consequence of building a universe where it often looks like kids are playing dress up (Vincent Kartheiser is supposed to be Amanda Seyfried’s father, for example). Olivia Wilde, a few years Timberlake’s junior, plays his mother. While Niccol briefly flirts with the Oedipal subtext, the film pursues a different agenda, and the “forever young” gimmick evaporates.

References to the Occupy Wall Street movement pop up in several reviews of “In Time,” with both Melissa Anderson and Stephanie Zacharek opining that the movie is “for the 99 percent.” If that assumption is correct, the proletariat surely deserves a smarter story. Niccol’s stiff emphasis on the “Bonnie and Clyde” robberies Will commits with love interest Sylvia Weis (Seyfried) drains away precious moments that would be better spent sharpening the characters. Seyfried suffers the fate of so many before her, stuck playing a kidnapping victim who instantly falls in love with her captor. Flat “timekeeper” Cillian Murphy and thuggish senior citizen “minuteman” Alex Pettyfer are also underserved by Niccol’s heavy hand.

Like “Blade Runner,” “In Time” economizes on production costs by embracing the stylish retro-futurism pioneered in the former film, using vintage cars, architecture, and fashion to construct its vision of the world to come. Author Harlan Ellison, whose often-reprinted short story “’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” shares a number of basic similarities with “In Time,” attracted some minor publicity for the movie when he filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers, but Ellison’s own indebtedness to Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” somewhat diminishes the claim in a genre teeming with time-focused stories and standard contrivances like the dehumanizing dangers of megacorporations and corrupt governments. Even though “In Time” isn’t hard-boiled enough to qualify as purist cyberpunk, it fulfills the genre’s preoccupation with “high tech and low life.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

At first glance, Craig Brewer’s remake of the massively successful 1984 musical-drama “Footloose,” seems like an unusual choice for the director of the adult-oriented “Hustle & Flow” and “Black Snake Moan.” Brewer’s public adoration for Herbert Ross’ coming of age quasi-fable includes an anecdote that the teenager recorded and memorized the entire audio track of the film when he figured out how to connect his VCR to his boombox, and the slavish act of reconstruction on display is certainly a testament to the moviemaker’s reverence for the film that catapulted Kevin Bacon to stardom following a string of mostly disappointing features.

Very little in the new edition substantively improves on the old model, although the smartest change sees Ren McCormack’s move to Bomont necessitated by his mother’s death. Original screenwriter Dean Pitchford receives co-script credit with Brewer, and a significant amount of dialogue is recycled verbatim. This less-is-more approach, which doesn’t extend to the intensified displays of choreography packed into the update, arguably retains the suspension-of-disbelief earnestness revolving around a public dance ban and the irrepressible youth who quote from the Bible in an effort to change the law. No matter how corny, teen movies can be fertile ground for expressions of generational clash, and the game of tractor chicken, less successfully rewritten as figure-eight school bus roulette, invokes the primacy of “Rebel without a Cause.”

Brewer announces his fidelity to the source material when Ren uncovers a dusty vinyl copy of Quiet Riot’s “Metal Health” and instantly pulls up “Bang Your Head (Metal Health)” on his iPod, even though Brewer banishes most other traces of contemporary digital life. From Ren’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle to Ariel’s red cowboy boots, nostalgia dominates the design of the 2011 “Footloose.” Kenny Wormald’s Ren and Julianne Hough’s Ariel may be able to out-hoof Bacon and Singer, but neither one can do as much dramatic damage. Hough’s apple-cheeked preacher’s daughter never hints at the reserves of wild-child hellraising attained by the often overlooked Singer.

The new “Footloose” uses fewer of the original’s signature tracks than the 1998 stage version that debuted on Broadway to mixed reviews, but familiar hallmarks include the “teaching Willard to dance” montage accompanied by Deniece Williams’ number one “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” as well as the “Dancing in the Sheets” drive-in sequence, transformed and sampled into a sweaty, bouncing, racially-mixed grind by David Banner called “Dance the Night Away.” Set in Georgia, Brewer’s Southern roots open the door for African American influences to be more robustly implemented, but unfortunately, only a few roles have been reassigned to actors of color.

Aside from the musical tweaks, Brewer also ditches the book-burning scene, which functioned as a turning point in the humanization of John Lithgow’s grieving father. Viewers in 1984 were provided with several opportunities to recognize that the strict clergyman was, at heart, a reasonable man. The remake doesn’t ignore this angle entirely, but Dennis Quaid’s Shaw Moore ends up with less screen time than his predecessor. It’s fun to imagine what Bacon might have done in the part of the reverend, but alas, neither he nor Lori Singer makes a cameo appearance.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“The Thing” purports to be a prequel to John Carpenter’s fantastic reimagining of the legendary 1951 Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby sci-fi classic “The Thing from Another World,” but recycles enough content – including, rather confusingly, the title – to behave in several ways as a remake or imitation of the 1982 version. The feature directorial debut of Dutch moviemaker Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., “The Thing” returns to the bleak, snowswept landscape of an Antarctic research station where an international group led by a contingent of Norwegians stumbles upon a terrifying extraterrestrial able to mimic the human form.

“The Thing” is a mélange of familiar genre signifiers, splicing together elements of “The Old Dark House” formula in which the killer is hidden in plain sight among a collection of unfortunates trapped in an all but impossible to escape location, the final girl concept, the body horror so expertly accomplished in Carpenter’s vision, and plenty of scenes in which the grotesque abnormality stalks corridors in search of prey. Sad, then, that the movie favors shock over suspense and falls so short in pacing, intellectual curiosity, and ability to sustain any excitement – a far cry from what Anne Billson described when she identified Carpenter’s movie as “not just one of the greatest horror movies of all time, but as something of a Gesamt Kunstwerk of the genre.”

In the new film’s most welcome decision, the story’s protagonist is an American paleontologist named Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), whose intelligence, leadership, observational abilities and grace under pressure reflect favorably on her life expectancy when the others begin to panic. The casting of Winstead in the central role sets the table for van Heijningen to crib relentlessly from the Ellen Ripley playbook, and the director even composes one shot as direct homage to the iconic image of H.R. Giger’s ooze-dripping killer in uncomfortably close proximity to Sigourney Weaver’s dismayed visage.

With the exception of Winstead, a pilot played by Joel Edgerton, and Ulrich Thomsen’s bossy leader, almost all of the remaining characters are nearly indistinguishable from one another, and the lack of personality diminishes audience interest as the creature inevitably reduces the population. In the new version, the alien cannot replicate inorganic matter, a device that only superficially alters the tension of the blood test sequence from 1982. As for the incarnations of the Thing itself, the movie sticks close to the template established by Rob Bottin’s original, legendary special effects work, from the twisted fusion of conjoined faces to the creep of feminized, Dore-esque arachnid locomotion.

Winstead wields a flamethrower with considerably less swagger than Kurt Russell’s R.J. “Mac” MacReady, and despite the performer’s valiant efforts to breathe as much life as possible into an underwritten and very sober role, “The Thing” lacks a great deal of the preoccupation with human nature and motive so easily recognized in both of the earlier incarnations of John W. Campbell Jr.’s 1938 “Astounding Stories” novella “Who Goes There?” The durable story, with its themes of paranoia, imposters, surrogacy and parasitism, still has more than enough fans and admirers to draw the curious into the cinema for this latest telling – disappointing though it may be.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

George Clooney explores his interest in the messy, complex, and bruising competition of American political theatre in “The Ides of March,” a somber reiteration of the ancient rhymes encapsulated in the movie’s tagline: “Ambition seduces. Power corrupts.” One of Hollywood’s most outspoken liberals, director Clooney casts himself as Mike Morris, a sitting Pennsylvania governor and contender for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in a tightly contested Ohio primary. Despite his infectious idealism, accompanied by Shepard Fairey-styled iconography and polished public speaking skills, Morris is doomed to disappoint junior campaign manager Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), a young staffer whose hero worship will be tested to its limits.

As Myers, Ryan Gosling continues his successful operation to devour plum roles, and the compelling actor, already Oscar-nominated for his performance in “Half Nelson” in 2006, is surrounded here by several Academy Award winners whose ranks he will someday likely join. As dictated by the genre, Myers initially embodies an unsustainable, trusting earnestness that will be supplanted by jaded, cynical, and cutthroat maneuvering, and one of the strengths of “The Ides of March” lies in the pleasure of watching Gosling’s character lose his religion right before your eyes. Gosling receives gifts of support from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, and Evan Rachel Wood.

Adapted by Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon from Willimon’s 2008 play “Farragut North,” “The Ides of March” will no doubt be carefully parsed for any possible resemblance to current campaigns and figures, as well as the upcoming presidential race, but the drama most effectively addresses the universally recognizable strain of secrets and lies on one’s moral equilibrium. Reinforcing the old axiom/oxymoron concerning honest politicians, “The Ides of March” echoes its original stage incarnation especially in terms of the sheer amount of scenes in which a powerful man engages a less powerful man in pregnant and portentous dialogue.

Citing Preston Sturges’ “The Great McGinty,” Anthony Lane implies that historically speaking, comedy beats drama when it comes to the presentation of “convincing political conduct.” “The Ides of March” is short on any humor that lies outside of withering insults and sarcastic retorts, but in a rare flash of levity, Clooney does make time for a wry sex scene in which Myers cannot shift his attention away from Governor Morris on TV to pay attention to the flesh and blood partner in his arms. Any expression of Myers’ carnal desire for his boss, however, is downplayed in favor of the more traditional, straight, power-imbalanced, intern sex scandal.

In his fourth feature as director, Clooney continues to show a flair for rhythm and respect for his cast. “The Ides of March” benefits from Phedon Papamichael’s lovely cinematography and Stephen Mirrione’s editing, but Clooney appears to recognize the limits of the familiar tale being told, and smartly refocuses viewer attention on the micro, interpersonal level. While a few of Governor Morris’ beliefs are illuminated – his bold secularism is among the more intriguing admissions and is the kind of thing that could only exist in a fantasized, alternate reality America – most of the ideas are shrouded in fog.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In the sixth chapter of Michael Lewis’s bestseller “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane likens the demeanor of his ball club to the comedy “Major League.” The direct comparison fails to make it into Bennet Miller’s handsome, understated, and fictionalized movie version of the book, but the parallel is apt – because the underdog battling against all odds is almost certainly the most employed trope in sports movies. Baseball fanatics will debate the movie’s accuracy in numbing detail, but Miller is less concerned with the specific history of the A’s 2002 season than with the compelling tale of an iconoclast determined to test conventional wisdom.

“Moneyball” floats several David and Goliath scenarios central to Lewis’s original thesis, but the principal conflict, predicated on the huge gulf between the biggest and smallest payrolls in Major League Baseball, sets up statistic-rich sabermetrics decision-making against the romantically inclined traditions of individual player assessment. With Beane as protagonist, it is no surprise that Miller paints the roomful of jargon-spewing Oakland scouts as buffoonish dinosaurs whose shocking inability to recognize markers of legitimate accomplishment over hopeful expectations of future potential provides the simplified conflict demanded by big-budget moviemaking.

There’s more to it than that, and “Moneyball” fleetingly pays tribute to modern stats godfather Bill James, the man whose wit, philosophy and curiosity made mincemeat of many traditional beliefs about crunching big league numbers. Beane discovers his own magician and James disciple in Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a composite character primarily representing Paul DePodesta, who refused to allow the use of his name and likeness to the filmmakers. Beane takes the green Brand under his wing, and the unlikely partnership, comically punctuated by the physical discrepancy between Pitt and Hill, develops into the movie’s fundamental relationship.

Miller, who directed Philip Seymour Hoffman to an Oscar in “Capote,” boldly and surprisingly diminishes the actor’s role as A’s manager Art Howe, undervaluing Hoffman like so many of the players alluded to in “Moneyball.” Despite the actor’s fame, Howe fades into the background following a testy power struggle between front office and dugout, and the movie is made poorer by his absence. While “Moneyball” focuses on Beane, a handful of the players originally highlighted by Lewis, including David Justice, Chad Bradford, Jeremy Giambi, and especially Scott Hatteberg, contribute to the telling of the story.

The “Moneyball” script, credited to Academy Award-winning writers Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, punches up the relationship between Beane and his daughter Casey and the scenes between Pitt and Kerris Dorsey underscore Beane’s down-to-earth decency as a man whose unhealthy devotion to competition is outweighed by an underlying commitment to “not-baseball.” Despite Lewis’s original characterization of Beane as something of a maniac – and his apology in the afterword for doing so – Beane’s quirky habit of avoiding the stands, fans, and luxury boxes of the Coliseum during games humanizes him. “Moneyball” contemplates Beane’s failures as much as his successes, and the A’s record-setting twenty game winning streak means nothing when the team doesn’t make it to the World Series.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A stylish noir based on the novel by James Sallis, “Drive” instantly commands the attention of the design-conscious, thrill-seeking moviegoer. Despite its explosive violence and the sweaty embrace of young male fans ready to anoint Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn the next “auteur du jour,” “Drive” takes turns summoning our excitement and repelling it, asking us to believe that a man who wears a satiny, quilted silver racing jacket emblazoned with a large and ominous scorpion on the back doesn’t want to draw attention to himself.

Carried over from the book, that man is identified only as Driver, and Ryan Gosling plays him with an inscrutable smirk interrupted often by a protruding toothpick and rarely with conversation. As we draw closer to the taciturn wheelman, his day job performing automotive stunts in the make-believe world of the movies announces a confusion of fantasy and reality that facilitates the astonishingly immediate outbursts of violence that float in the liminal space carved out by only a certain kind of crime movie. Refn never identifies any of the film industry projects involving Driver, but the novel’s remake of “Thunder Road” might have been nice to keep.

In-demand talents like Gosling and Carey Mulligan might attract more attention, but “Drive” belongs to its most seasoned veterans. Albert Brooks plays a pragmatic but deadly mobster whose lacerating straight razor is given a run for its money by the old criminal’s equally sharp mouth. Every time he turns up, Brooks runs away with the film. Mulligan is given too little to do, but the doomed, forbidden romance – which culminates in a surreal, tour de force elevator car liebestod – cements Driver’s fate in the fraternity of God’s Lonely Men.

There is some question regarding Refn’s ability or interest in navigating away from ridiculousness and parody when it threatens to get too close. Certainly, Driver’s debt to the Man with No Name extends to the mayhem he doles out to the scumbags who are presented to us as if they deserve hammered knuckles and steel-toed stomps to the crania. Refn uses Driver’s twisted chivalry as one of several barriers to the peace and happiness he might otherwise find with Mulligan’s Irene (whose parallel Irina barely registers in the book), but the movie seems to tacitly endorse Driver’s bestial and barbaric modus operandi simply because he has been crossed by more gruesome monsters.

Even so, screenwriter Hossein Amini completely overhauls the terse, poetic voice of the novel, and the changes utterly transform Sallis’ cryptic prose and add flesh to the skeletal characters. On the big screen, “Drive” moves like a shark, gliding forward with singular purpose toward what might be the fundamental impulse to survive in the face of encroaching death. Sallis fractured the chronology, jumping forward and backward, but the movie smartly lights a slow-burning linear fuse that mimics the loud-quiet-loud Pixies dynamic so valued by Nirvana. Refn’s affinity for the head and the heady, a motif ideally expressed by the emotionless latex mask Driver occasionally dons, honors inspirations from David Lynch to Jean-Pierre Melville (although Refn singles out Alejandro Jodorowksy in the end credits). “Drive” is far from perfect, but its existential curiosity gives it a sizable lead over its competition.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Like several of Steven Soderbergh’s large canvas features – and even a few of his smaller ones – “Contagion” paints a grim scenario of human fragility, frailty, and fear. Workable as a metaphor for the post-9/11 world as readily as the economically depressed slow-motion global financial catastrophe (already explored in its early stages in “The Girlfriend Experience”), “Contagion” perhaps most closely resembles the director’s drug war/trade ensemble “Traffic.” Darting like a hummingbird among several interconnected storylines unfolding simultaneously in locations around the world, Soderbergh swiftly connects the dots of a mounting health calamity. Sales of hand sanitizer stand to spike in the next few weeks.

It might be convenient to cast Soderbergh as a pessimist, but for all the scenes of looted grocery stores, empty airports, and the hauntingly familiar sight of missing person flyers, “Contagion” embraces the tried and true structure of the procedural, linking together the cumulative efforts of bug-hunting brainiacs in laboratories and on the front lines. The specter of terrorism permeates the movie’s imagery, and even though the notion of the virus as a bio-weapon is quickly dismissed, the ranting of a conspiracy-minded crank blogger played by Jude Law buoys the hopes of skeptics.

Naysayers attack Soderbergh’s icy fatalism as the Achilles’ Heel of “Contagion,” but despite the movie’s macrocosmic hive view, each of the principal characters, and several of the supporting ones, makes a convincing case for the director’s speculative gut-check response to the widespread panic and subsequent lawlessness that blossoms as the epidemic worsens. Matt Damon’s grieving husband and father is the film’s representative Average Joe, and even though his immunity to the disease affords the audience a wide latitude of relief, an old-fashioned can-do spirit accompanies the stories concerning the trained professionals in or near harm’s way – particularly the indefatigable doctor played by Jennifer Ehle.

Like the disaster thrillers produced by Irwin Allen, “Contagion” applies the “Anyone Can Die” trope, but does so sparingly. The movie’s trailer sold “Contagion” on the premise that Gwyneth Paltrow’s international business traveler doesn’t make it, but somewhat surprisingly, only one other major player expires during the course of the action, and that death is treated with an almost ruthless lack of drama. Superior to the similarly themed “Outbreak,” but more aligned with horror/sci-fi material including “28 Days Later,” “I Am Legend,” and even “Children of Men,” Forrest Wickman has already pointed out that “Contagion” can be added to the roster of strong network narratives or, as Alissa Quart calls them, “hyperlink movies.”

Soderbergh’s scientific process affirmation positions the film’s several epidemiologists as nerd superstar heroes, but the role of the U.S. government, both in terms of crisis response – handled with a perpetually cool head by Laurence Fishburne’s CDC official – and in the potential for unfair treatment of American citizens, is deliberately murkier. “Contagion” might well have been subtitled “Keep Calm and Carry On,” and in the end, the dedicated civil servants industriously, and a little comically, banish the fictional germ to the deep-freeze dustbin alongside SARS and H1N1. Soderbergh cannot, however, resist a spine-tingling coda imagining the unholy, human-caused association of “the wrong bat” and “the wrong pig” that spawned the trouble in the first place.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Based on a 2007 Israeli movie with the same title, John Madden’s remake of “The Debt” dramatizes Cold War-era Nazi hunting in East Berlin and a cloudy love triangle involving the Mossad agents sent to capture a villain known as the Surgeon of Birkenau. Cutting between the 1965 kidnapping assignment and 1997 events commemorating the presumably heroic actions of the operatives, “The Debt” pivots on a major plot twist linking past and present. Despite the movie’s underutilization of Helen Mirren, Ciaran Hinds, and Tom Wilkinson, “The Debt” manages to revisit a number of long-echoing questions of good, evil, and human nature raised by the grim events of the Holocaust.

The moviemaking technique employing two sets of actors to embody characters who have aged across decades requires a nimble director, a competent editor, and a group of performers committed to developing some sense of consistency. In “The Debt,” both Jessica Chastain and Mirren play Rachel Singer, an intensely dedicated government agent who endures a series of grim tests of psychological commitment to a presumably greater cause. “The Debt” implies that Singer’s selection to the East Berlin team hinged on her gender and her willingness to pose as a pregnancy-minded young patient to infiltrate the clinic run by Nazi-in-hiding Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen).

Singer’s devotion to Israel and the pursuit of justice places her in an unenviable position of incredible vulnerability, as the undercover officer tolerates a series of vaginal exams given by the target of the undertaking. The potentially exploitative circumstances of the unorthodox methods used on the assignment are rife with subtext pairing Singer’s risk of identity exposure to the literal uncovering of her body. That Vogel once participated in medical atrocities committed against Jews but later assumed the role of life-affirming obstetrics and gynecology professional adds another layer of complexity to the proceedings.

Madden squeezes a maximum of squirm-inducing tension from the exam room scenes, and Singer’s relationship to Vogel develops with greater specificity than the muddier romantic feelings she expresses toward her fellow team members. That Rachel Singer’s point of view is privileged and centralized in a genre heavily oriented toward masculinity distinguishes “The Debt” from the majority of its peers, but the staging of several physical altercations involving Singer (including a locked-thighs choke-out evocative of vagina dentata) strongly suggests that any consideration of gender issues will favor action over introspection.

Madden bookends the film with the more recent storyline, placing the 1965 caper at the heart of the narrative in a whopping flashback triggered by the release of a non-fiction account of the episode written by Rachel’s daughter three decades later. Despite the 1997 Rachel’s desire to protect her daughter’s reputation, “The Debt” somewhat inexplicably steers clear of some much-needed exploration of the consequences of the political conspiracy that has remained a secret for so long. Mirren and Wilkinson play a few small scenes that hint at a finer account of long-bottled guilt, remorse, and frustration, but the last act of “The Debt” depends on a wildly improbable scenario that sends Rachel into a creepy sanitarium on one final do-or-die mission.