ENTEBBE

Cast: Daniel Brühl, Rosamund Pike, Nonso Anozie, Eddie Marsan, Lior Ashkenazi

 Director: José Padilha 

106 mins

Entebbe (also released as '7 Days in Entebbe') is a blase stroll through a desperate and harrowing affair, inspiring more boredom than fear and utterly lacking in suspense. The 1976 terrorist takeover of an Air France jet, collusion with an outlaw state - led by a vain, delusional and murderous lunatic with Jews singled out among the passengers for mass murder by German and Arab hijackers - at the time inspired fierce debate, within and without the Israeli government - but little of it is shown here. The operation was planned, re-planned, rehearsed and re-rehearsed, with every passing hour raising the stakes and the tension. Not that you’d know that by seeing this film.  Daniel Brühl and Rosamund Pike play the idealistic/fanatical German remnants of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, leftist terrorists in disarray, desperate for a face-saving/status reviving action that would put them back on the map. Under the overall command of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and with two Arab accomplices, they brazenly brought machine guns and grenades on board a Tel Aviv to Air France flight with 248 people on board and took control.

The script hints at the naive radical book publisher “Boni” Böse (Brühl) as being idealistic, but not the hardened, committed soldier for the cause that those who were fighting to take their homeland back from Israeli domination had hoped for. The script has Brühl’s character overly-concerned about how Germans killing Jews might look in the headlines – because he insists that he’s no Nazi.  Pike brings her “Gone Girl” crazy-eyes expression to Brigitte Kuhlman, his co-leader, even though the actual hijacking is shot and edited in a most perfunctory, unexciting fashion.

Back in Israel, the government of Yitzhak Rabin (a low-energy performance by the great Israeli actor Lior Ashkenazi) treats this as not just a military threat, but a political one. Will Defence Minister Shimon Peres (a hideously odd-looking Eddie Marsan), militating for a military response straight away, use this to bring down Rabin’s government?’ Whatever little suspense there is on board the jet, which travelled to Libya to re-fuel and the on to Idi Amin’s Uganda, is frittered away in the quietestIsraeli Cabinet meetings in recorded history. There’s no fractious debate, no voices-raised considering of the stakes of negotiating with terrorists, no bickering over how the world will see their action or inaction, only silence from virtually every actor on set apart from Marsan and Ashkenazi.

Then there’s what might have been the most interesting parallel in the story, the Israeli modern dance company putting on an arresting, symbolic “Shed your Orthodox Fanatic Garb” piece (choreographed by Ohad Naharin), led by lead dancer Sarah (Zina Zinchenko) - their rehearsals and performances functioning as a metaphor for framing the action as Sarah’s commando/lover (Ben Schnetzer) prepares for war. The commando training, a staple of such films is given short shrift – but not the dancing! The hostages barely make an impression, as a group or as individuals, apart from a gruff French aircrew engineer (Denis Ménochet).

Nonso Anozie certainly has the look, the braying self-promotion and the chuckle of Idi Amin, but little of the murderous menace. Too much time is wasted on the moral debates of the two German hijackers and a half-hearted attempt to fill in their back story. That contributes to the sense of a film that tries to have it both ways — jingoistic Israeli decisiveness and righteousness (the Holocaust is invoked), vs. Europe’s youth, consumed with passionate support for legitimate Palestinian grievances and the world’s lack of attention to them.