Saturday, September 3, 2011

The Debt- You Had Me and Then You Lost Me

The Debt was a fine film until the last five minutes and then something happened that completely shattered my suspension of disbelief and ruined the whole thing: Helen Mirren's character, Rachel Singer, gets stabbed. She was standing face to face with Dr. Vogel and she just gets stabbed in the neck without really putting up a fight.

Let's look at our match-up. She is a former Mossad agent, trained in things like situational awareness and unarmed combat and he is a...doctor. She is fifty-five at the time of the confrontation, not young but not yet really old, while he is no younger than his late seventies.

Sure he got away from her in 1967, but he surprised her from behind. When they met in 1997, he is right in front of her, he announces that he is Dr. Vogel, and the scissors are in plain view. She should have killed him before he ever landed a stab.

All I can think of is that this is some sort of suicide attempt, but why would she give this unrepentant Nazi the satisfaction of killing another Jew? (That sentence will one day be chopped up and used out of context in a political ad against me.) And furthermore, there's no reason to think that she died. She gets up after the neck wound, so it must have missed the windpipe and the jugular, and it is probably not fatal. Nor is she likely to die from a single stab to the gut, especially since this fight takes place in a hospital.

So The Debt, you had me and then you lost me.

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