An insipid revisit

Johnson Thomas

Daniel Bruhl and Rosamund Pike play German radicals Wilfried Bose and Brigitte Kuhlmann in Jose Padilha's thriller about the 1976 Israeli rescue of hostages from a hijacked Air France flight, diverted to Entebbe, Uganda. But their star presence fails to drum up enough affect for this largely unremarkable thriller, which gets a little too wayward in its politics. 

Their performances are largely caricature and the direction is hopelessly muddled. Probably, the driving purpose of re-dramatising this story is that new information about its climactic raid was declassified recently, but it’s quite unclear from the film what that new information might be or whether it was justification enough for making this reboot.

The narrative juxtaposes a fringe performer, an Israeli special Ops officer and his personal equation with his partner through a series of dance rehearsals contrasted against the preparatory political and strategic maneuvers for the surreptitious strike on Entebbe. 

The celebrated dance piece by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin performed by Batsheva Dance company members opens as the strike is on and ends as expected in a rousing ovation to freedom from captivity. The subject matter has been done before in several better films across the past decades so there wasn’t much point in this revisit other than as an information point for the new generation. 

The main problematic aspect of the film though is its effort to focus on the two radical terrorists’ point of view, which it does with a confused, almost muddled ideological interpretation. The lethargic tempo caused by the largely hackneyed cross-cutting between the dance performance and strategic action scenes, addled with a lame altogether unromantic and indistinctive subplot makes matters worse. It’s also quite confusing when the focus is entirely on the two German radicals instead of the Palestinian revolutionaries heading the operation. We never get to know them or allowed to become sympathetic/empathetic to their cause. As a result we never get to experience the historic poignancy of this event full on. This film is largely a lost cause.