Action heroes in Hollywood movies are generally handsome, virile studs, handy with a gun or a girl, preferably both.
However, in “Remember,” the two principals, Zev and Max, are both 90-year-old Holocaust survivors, passing their not-so-golden years in an assisted living facility.
Max (Martin Landau) is wheelchair-bound but with sharp mind, while Zev (Christopher Plummer), though ambulatory, slips in and out of dementia and borderline Alzheimer’s. The two are bound by a common tragedy. Both of their families were murdered in Auschwitz by the same SS guard.
Now, some 70 years later, Max has discovered that the murderous guard escaped to America after the war and assumed the name of Rudy Kurlander. To complicate matters, Max has been informed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center (nice plug) that there are four men by that name living in the United States and Canada.
During a long session at the retirement home, Max hands Zev an envelope full of addresses, instructions and $100 bills, and tasks him to find each of the Kurlanders, and, when he finds the ex-SS guard, to kill him.