Entebbe. (15.)
Directed by José Padilha.
Starring Rosamund Pike, Daniel Brühl, Eddie Marsan, Nonso Anozie, Ben Schnetzer, Denis Ménochet. 107 mins.
This takes us back to the good old days when the primary concern of anyone caught up in a hijacking was how the toilet breaks would be managed. In the 70s, when Marxism was the fundamentalist creed, hostages tended to be in there for the long haul and when a collection of German Marxists and Palestinian revolutionaries took control of an Air France plane flying from Jerusalem to Paris and flew it to Entebbe airport in Uganda, that was the start of a nine-day ordeal finally ended (look away now those with no knowledge of postwar history) with a daring raid by Israeli marines.
This reconstruction of the 1976 hijacking begins with a sequence where the history of the creation of Israel and the displacement of the Palestinians is presented through the medium of interpretive modern dance. I'm not quite sure what the connection is with a wave of dancers flinging themselves up off their semi-circle of chairs and one of them falling to the floor, but it is a striking visual image. It is the only bold or innovative move in the whole film, but it becomes its fatal flaw.
The film takes a bog standard disaster movie approach to the story. It has a foot in many camps. We switch between the Israeli government fretting over what to do, and our various narrative representatives in hostage situation: the flight engineer (Menochet), a hostage Jewish family, the Palestinian terrorists, a member of the Israeli military force and his dancer girlfriend. Mostly though the focus is on Pike and Brühl as the two German Baader Meinhof revolutionaries who, after overseeing the initial hijacking, find themselves being sidelined in Uganda. They agonize over being Germans threatening to kill Jews and Brühl's character tries to be as even-handed and fair as possible.
Brazilian director Padilha once seemed to be a talent on the move but his (really quite good I thought) Robocop remake fell flat and the resulting Hollywood cold shoulder led him to pitch in with British production company Working Title. Entebbe though is a film where you can't see where the impetus came from. In its even-handed way, it is tentatively trying to suggest to Israel that maybe some kind of negotiation might be the best way forward, but there's no fire or passion in this film. It limps along and none of the performances seems particularly animated or enthused. Anozie's roly-poly Idi Amin is simply comic relief.
The obvious flaw in the film is, however balanced it tries to be, the decisive, firm Israelis become the heroes. Whatever the bigger issues, in a film narrative you root for the baddies to get their comeuppance. They are the terrorists, they deserve to die and remain so even after one of them explains that he is there because his entire family had been killed when an Israeli tank flattened their car as they were trying to escape from a massacre. It may be unintentional but the movie's momentum is revenge and catharsis. The film subverts that audience lust by making the raid we've been waiting the entire film for, one of the most insipid action sequences ever filmed and by inter-cutting it with the aforementioned dance performance. I like that dance performance but the idea of inter-cutting it with the raid, which no doubt looked incredibly bold on paper, is just cringeworthy. It effectively decimates what little credibility the film had left.
Directed by José Padilha.
Starring Rosamund Pike, Daniel Brühl, Eddie Marsan, Nonso Anozie, Ben Schnetzer, Denis Ménochet. 107 mins.
This takes us back to the good old days when the primary concern of anyone caught up in a hijacking was how the toilet breaks would be managed. In the 70s, when Marxism was the fundamentalist creed, hostages tended to be in there for the long haul and when a collection of German Marxists and Palestinian revolutionaries took control of an Air France plane flying from Jerusalem to Paris and flew it to Entebbe airport in Uganda, that was the start of a nine-day ordeal finally ended (look away now those with no knowledge of postwar history) with a daring raid by Israeli marines.
This reconstruction of the 1976 hijacking begins with a sequence where the history of the creation of Israel and the displacement of the Palestinians is presented through the medium of interpretive modern dance. I'm not quite sure what the connection is with a wave of dancers flinging themselves up off their semi-circle of chairs and one of them falling to the floor, but it is a striking visual image. It is the only bold or innovative move in the whole film, but it becomes its fatal flaw.
The film takes a bog standard disaster movie approach to the story. It has a foot in many camps. We switch between the Israeli government fretting over what to do, and our various narrative representatives in hostage situation: the flight engineer (Menochet), a hostage Jewish family, the Palestinian terrorists, a member of the Israeli military force and his dancer girlfriend. Mostly though the focus is on Pike and Brühl as the two German Baader Meinhof revolutionaries who, after overseeing the initial hijacking, find themselves being sidelined in Uganda. They agonize over being Germans threatening to kill Jews and Brühl's character tries to be as even-handed and fair as possible.
Brazilian director Padilha once seemed to be a talent on the move but his (really quite good I thought) Robocop remake fell flat and the resulting Hollywood cold shoulder led him to pitch in with British production company Working Title. Entebbe though is a film where you can't see where the impetus came from. In its even-handed way, it is tentatively trying to suggest to Israel that maybe some kind of negotiation might be the best way forward, but there's no fire or passion in this film. It limps along and none of the performances seems particularly animated or enthused. Anozie's roly-poly Idi Amin is simply comic relief.
The obvious flaw in the film is, however balanced it tries to be, the decisive, firm Israelis become the heroes. Whatever the bigger issues, in a film narrative you root for the baddies to get their comeuppance. They are the terrorists, they deserve to die and remain so even after one of them explains that he is there because his entire family had been killed when an Israeli tank flattened their car as they were trying to escape from a massacre. It may be unintentional but the movie's momentum is revenge and catharsis. The film subverts that audience lust by making the raid we've been waiting the entire film for, one of the most insipid action sequences ever filmed and by inter-cutting it with the aforementioned dance performance. I like that dance performance but the idea of inter-cutting it with the raid, which no doubt looked incredibly bold on paper, is just cringeworthy. It effectively decimates what little credibility the film had left.
