THIS English-language remake of the 2007 Israeli film “Ha-Hov” has impressive pre-production credits (director John Madden, writers Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn) and cast.

In 1997, retired Mossad field operative Sarah (Helen Mirren) learns that Dr Bernhardt (Jesper Christensen), the Butcher of Birkenau, is not dead as told in Sarah’s book, which told how in 1966 she shot him in Germany when he broke free from her and two male colleagues holding him captive while awaiting rendition to Israel for war crimes.

Sarah and her colleagues (Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds) know damn well that Sarah’s pistol shot didn’t kill Bernhardt three decades earlier.

They have kept the secret hoping that Bernhardt would never surface. If they don’t now pick up where they left off, their status as national heroes will vanish.

There is a strong indication that the film’s original argument is Bernhardt’s scorn for how a thousand Jews at a time failed to resist the handful of soldiers herding them into the gas chamber.

I certainly have wondered why they let that happen without a fight.

There’s reason to conjecture that the film’s original purpose might have been to push modern Israeli audiences to ponder that question.

At Greater Union and Dendy