‘7 Days in Entebbe’
Directed by José Padilha
Starring Daniel Brühl, Rosamund Pike, Lior Ashkenazi
Rated PG-13
The story of Operation Entebbe is a well-trod pop cultural landscape, having been the subject of narrative films, books, documentaries and just about every other form of media imaginable.
Still, it’s rich territory with abundant dramatic potential — both as a nail-biting thriller and a reflection of geopolitical currents that remain as unsettled and confused today as ever.
So it’s clear why the Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha felt compelled to return to the story of the June 27, 1976, hijacking of Air France Flight 139 from Tel Aviv to Paris, by German radicals and members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the astonishing rescue operation carried out by Israel special forces in Entebbe, Uganda, one week later.
Padilha is an ideal fit for this genre. He’s best known for the “Elite Squad” series of police thrillers and his work on “Narcos.” He skillfully cross-cuts between the hostage drama and the political fireworks at the upper tier of the Israeli government, where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashenazi) and Defense Minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) find themselves at loggerheads over what to do about this crisis.
The filmmaker, working from a script by Gregory Burke, has a tougher time in his efforts to expand the scope of the narrative and explore some of the stickier moral questions. Rosamund Pike and Daniel Brühl give thoughtful, intense performances as the German hijackers Brigitte Kuhlmann and Wilfried Böse, and the movie takes great pains to humanize them. But it’s hard to shake the reality that their presence is incidental to the central story here and that the narrative would be crisper and more compelling without a lot of the hand-wringing their characters bring to it.
Similarly, the introduction of an interpretive dance motif — in the form of a performance by a modern troupe to the traditional Passover song “Who Knows One” — represents a halfhearted attempt to visualize the tumultuous and complex realities of this history. At the beginning of the movie, it serves as an attention-grabbing framing device. By the time it’s interfering with the most essential climactic drama, the approach starts to feel superfluous at best and downright infuriating at worst.
That’s not to suggest a simpler and more straightforward retelling of this story would have been a better approach. The instinct to explore the complex realities that created this harrowing situation is the right one. It’s simply not realized sharply enough.
