Entebbe [7 Days in Entebbe] * (2018, Rosamund Pike, Daniel Brühl, Eddie Marsan, Denis Ménochet, Lior Ashkenazi) – Movie Review

Entebbe (aka 7 Days in Entebbe) recounts the story of Operation Entebbe, the Israeli commandos’ daring 1976 counter-terrorist hostage-rescue operation in Uganda, after the terrorists hijack an Air France flight en route from Tel Aviv to Paris and land at Entebbe. The film means well but it is dull and sluggish, and often unconvincing, with its limp momentum grinding to a halt every on and again, and no exciting rescue climax depicting the battle to free the hostages.

It focuses mainly on two of the German terrorists, Brigitte Kuhlmann (Rosamund Pike) and Wilfried Böse (Daniel Brühl), trying to humanise them, showing them as conflicted and fairly kindly to the hostages, just more victims of the same situation that started with the creation of the state of Israel after the Second World War. Without taking sides, the effort to understand the terrorists and sympathise with them is difficult. We do, however, see other terrorists mishandling and frightening the hostages, beating up one of them they think might be an agent.

The other focus is on the Israeli Cabinet and its agonising decision of what to do when so many of its nationals are threatened with death on foreign soil. And there is a tiny little bit about the Israeli special forces unit that conducted the operation, but not much.

Two films back in the Seventies tackled the subject with varying degrees of success. I guess you need a reason to retell the story now. New facts might have come out, or some new take might be tried. But the film’s slim idea of topicality is only that the Israelis and the Palestinians are not currently talking.

Several things bring the film crashing down. (1): the casting of Rosamund Pike as fiery, young German terrorist Brigitte Kuhlmann. This is miscasting on a grand scale and there is nothing this good actress can do to combat it. She has the main star role too. Daniel Brühl is loads and loads better, well cast and giving pretty much an ideal, credible performance. Eddie Marsan is uneasy as Israeli politician Shimon Peres, the calculating Defence Minister, and Denis Ménochet (so good in Custody) is dull as French plane engineer Jacques Le Moine, but Lior Ashkenazi hits the target in a quitely instense turn as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Nonso Anozie’s jokey performance as Idi Amin seems misguided.

(2). The long-awaited rescue climax depicting the battle to free the hostages is undercut by a misguided, arty dance sequence that dogs the entire movie, starting it, punctuating it and finishing it off. The puzzling final dance scene, such as it, was ruined at my cinema by the house lights going on and patrons giving up and going home. The rescue climax is also spoiled by intercutting and arty slo-mo. The director is of course actually really saying we don’t want any action thrills to spoil the movie.

(3.) The dialogue is very weak – and so are the characterisations – in a generally feeble, obvious screenplay. Its messages are diffuse. This might mean an attempt at intelligence and subtlety, but it just comes over as lame.

Brühl and Ashkenazi offer the film’s two good performances, but it is not enough to save Entebbe, though, to be fair, they were always gong to have an uphill struggle with it.

Raid on Entebbe (1976) with Peter Finch and Charles Bronson and Victory at Entebbe (1976) with Kirk Douglas and Anthony Hopkins were the rival Seventies Entebbe movies.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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