Debt be not proud: One move that pomises much but doesn't pay off

"The Debt" has some redeeming qualities and it probably could have been a good movie or at least a better movie if it were 20 minutes shorter, but ultimately at most it's a reasonably entertaining, often exasperating thriller that breaks no new ground. J Chastain is excellent in the lead as a young Mossad agent, dispatched to East Berlin ca 1965 to capture and bring back alive to Israel a doctor who's much like Mengele. The movie has one really interesting twist: the movie takes place in the near present (the 90s, anyway) and in the 60s, and in the present Helen Mirren places an older version of the Mossad agent; in the present we see a scene of Mengele's escape, as Mirren remembers or retells it, but over the course of the movie we learn that her version is not accurate at all: a little bit of Rashomon, and also a little bit of an examination of the accuracy of historical accounts, as well as an exploration of a moral dilemma that the team of 3 Mossad agents faced when their captive escaped. That said, much of the rest of the movie is a mess - the attempt to steal the doctor out of East Berlin is very poorly staged and almost impossible to understand, much of the movie is highly unpleasant (the long captivity of the doctor, the force feeding, etc. was just plain repulsive and unredeeming), the brilliant Mossad plot to extirpate the doctor is utterly ridiculous if you think about it for 2 minutes (why, for example, would they have Chastain attack him while he's giving her a gynecological exam? Could she ever be in a more vulnerable position? it's just a cinematic ploy, like much else in the movie), and, as noted, the final 20 minutes or so when Mirren puts her spy cloak back on and goes on a far-fetched mission to the Ukraine is beyond absurd. Had this movie been a little more modest and little better thought through, it could have been much more powerful - true of so many American commercial films, by the way. I wonder if the Israeli original version was better - would guess so.