“The first causality of war is always the truth.” That’s the epigraph that launches one of this week’s new releases, Five Days of War, but it could just as easily be the quote that frames the action of John Madden’s The Debt. The truth, and its relation to history, is what is at stake in this movie, which wraps together all the ingredients of a smart, exciting espionage thriller – spies, shootouts, romance, Nazis – even though the sum total never feels more than its promising parts.

The movie’s central question is what happened on a fateful night in 1966 when three top level Israeli agents find themselves in an apartment in East Berlin with a captured Nazi war criminal. The trio, led by Stephan (Marton Csokas) with David (Sam Worthington) and Rachel (Jessica Chastain), have been working on a plan to abduct the Nazi doctor (Jesper Christensen) and ship him back to Israel for trial. But everything goes wrong. The planned smuggling of the doctor onto a westward bound U-Bahn train is busted up by East German police. And then, after returning to the apartment, the doctor escapes, only to be shot by Rachel in a dramatic, Hollywood-style scene.

We learn about Rachel’s remarkable sharpshooting by way of Rachel’s daughter, Sarah (Romi Aboulafia) who, years later, has written a book about the incident. As it unfolds, The Debt tells these two stories concurrently, the 1966 mission and the revisiting of that mission that occurs in the wake of Sarah’s book. The intent is to show how memory, both individual and collective, manipulates our understanding of the past. The story of the mission has become the stuff of Israeli legend, and the three agents are well-known heroes. Yet as The Debt retells the messy details that led up to the capturing and killing of the Nazi doctor, we begin to understand that reality is more complex and multifaceted than popular history.

Madden arouses our suspicions with a sudden bang early in the movie. Before we are familiar with the characters and their interconnected relationships, we watch as an older David (played by one of my favorite Irish actors, Ciarán Hinds) is escorted by an sunglasses-wearing agent from his Tel Aviv apartment only to throw himself in front of a bus before he gets in the agent’s car. It will be a while before we know just why David was so impulsively suicidal, and it speaks somewhat to Madden’s mishandling of The Debt’s complex web of intrigue, that it is a jarring incident is so quickly forgotten as we dive into the rest of the movie. We learn in the flashbacks to 1966, though, that David and Rachel were falling in love during the mission, even if, it a sudden passionate twist, it was Stephan who ultimately sleeps with the attractive young agent and later marries her. When we meet the older couple, they have been long divorced.

Madden (Shakespeare in Love) had his work cut out for him, trying to balance the impact of all of The Debt’s tangential storylines. The most essential action – the 1966 mission – proves the most engrossing and dramatically effective. Locked away in a Berlin apartment, a love triangle develops between the three agents, which plays out against the growing tension of their situation and the friction between Stephan’s pragmatic, real politik Weltanshauang, and David’s zealous thirst for judicial revenge. We’ve seen a lot of actress Jessica Chastain lately (The Help, The Tree of Life, Coriolanus), and here she proves an action star who can work with depth, alternatively fragile and steely, working emotional stress beneath the monotone of her staid facial complexion.

Interestingly, it is her counter part, the veteran Helen Mirren, who plays the older Rachel, who has trouble tugging her side of the story along. Lacking the same situational grit of the flashbacks, the contemporary scenes ramp up the melodrama to compensate, yet it proves a sweeping story that never quite sweeps us up. These scenes play like a mop-up, rather than a deepening, of themes introduced in the historical action, and Mirren’s Rachel feels incongruous with the younger actress’s portrayal: too blustery and skittish. It all comes ahead in a final cliché-ridden chase that packs its share of bumps if feeling somewhat unnecessary. The stab and job ending is a distraction, and symptomatic of a movie that feels like a handful of films clumsily quilted together.