| Review:
|
Helen Mirren again rises to her usual dramatic height
as Rachel Singer in this remake of the Israeli film Ha-Hov
about a team of three Mossad agents who years before had
been sent to East Berlin to kidnap and bring back to Israel
for trial Nazi doctor Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen)
who had performed gruesome experiments on prisoners during
the Holocaust. The film jumps back and forth between the
Fifties and the Sixties and the Nineties, so viewers have
to pay close attention to follow the plot twists.***
The dangerous plan involves Rachel (as a young woman
played by Jessica Chastain) posing as a patient to seek
the help of Vogel, now working as gynecoligist. They manage
to kidnap him, but their escape plan goes awry, so they
hole up in an apartment where the arrogant doctor taunts
them with his anti-Semitic jibes. The two men Stefan and
David (Sam Worthington and Martin Csokas, with Tom Wilkinson
and Ciaran Hinds playing the older pair) soon find themselves
in their treatment of the bound-up Vogel acting in the same
brutal way as the Nazis had their captors, their hatred
boiling over and their patience exhausted as they search
for a new means of escaping.***
After their return to Israel where they report that
Rachel had shot Vogel when he was trying to escape, the
three are regarded as heroes. But they remain haunted by
their past and a dark secret that eats away at them. Rachel
had been drawn to one of the men but had married the other.
She gave birth to a daughter, who, along with her fellow
countrymen, had so admired her mother that she wrote a book
about her. Then comes news, first that David had committed
suicide, and second, a report that might unravel the story,
now enshrined in a book, of their mission to Berlin 31 years
earlier. Rachel sets out for a former Soviet republic to
set matters straight.***
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