Adam Frisch

What happened Danny? The terrible lighting, the cheesy dutch angles, the too wide lenses, the awful production design and worst of all that incessant trance music from your acid raves in the 90's. Too loud, too much, always on - like a bad EPK. Add to this a terrible script and the mind numbing boringness of hypnosis and "messing with your brain"-narrative. Granted, this is my personal hangup - and the trailer clearly showed as much, so I can't blame that - but it's just so boring to hinge a story on, precisely because there are no boundaries. Constraints add suspense. It's like listening to people go on and on about their dreams. Who cares? If it had been a straight whodunnit art heist movie, it would have been ten times better. At least then it would have had purpose.

I also read in reviews how everyone thinks this is Rosario Dawson's best role. Did we watch the same movie, I wonder? I love the girl, but here she was at best phoning it in from another galaxy. Everyone else is just about passable at best, perhaps disillusioned by the terrible premise of it all. Shame with such actors like Cassel etc. I wish I could give this more than 1 star, but I can't. I like you Danny Boyle, but this was the first movie in over 10 years where I asked my mate if we could leave after 30 minutes. He didn't, so I had to sit through the whole mess until the end.

First off, I find Spielberg to be one of the greatest directors of our time, so his considerable talents and skills are not in question. However, I do feel he was out of tune on this one. The main problem is the film's casting.

Jeremy Irvine lacks the skills to bring his character to life and we fail to see what motivates him. It could be a script problem as well, but nevertheless he doesn't work and we don't care for him. He's unfortunately cast for his sweet looks, when a boy we could actually relate to would have been much better. The German boy that later appears does a much better job in a shorter period - why couldn't they have found someone like that to play Albert? It goes on from there - many characters turn up but are miscast. There's a French farmer and his granddaughter where the granddaughter has one of the worst faux-French accents in cinema history and does a really bad job. Niels Arestrup, the veteran French character actor, also does the best he can but his character is written very two dimensionally. Film is littered with badly written, badly cast characters.

DP Janusz Kaminski also has over the years turned into a great over-lighter and there are harsh rims and an artificial light feel all over this film when naturalism would have been much better. Top this off with a terrible John Williams score completely lacking in any theme or melody and only being page one standard saccharine Hollywood fare designed to hit the cues, well, like on cue. It's utterly boring.

Spielberg needs to change the people he works with and mix it up, or else he gets sucked into these cheese-traps. He should get Michael Mann's casting agent, Hans Zimmer (who's not afraid to take chances) to score and get a new DP in and we'd get a much better movie out if it.

The Debt is a Nazi hunt/spy thriller all rolled into one and it's nice to see a classic thriller that takes the subject matter seriously and relies on suspense to keep us in its grip. I was at the edge of my seat for most of the time and there's plenty of surprising turns in the story to keep even the most jaded enthralled.

Most of todays inept filmmakers rely on blowing stuff up hoping that this will count as suspense. It also is such a breath of fresh air in an appalling year of C -grade superhero movies and obscure comic book adaptations. Hopefully this does well so Hollywood can go back to making well written thrillers and dramas like they used to.

Best suspense thriller of 2011 so far.