Entebbe review: Thoughtful and well acted but strangely lacking in tension

Dir José Padilha, 107 mins, starring: Rosamund Pike, Daniel Brühl, Eddie Marsan, Nonso Anozie, Ben Schnetzer

In recreating the story of “Operation Entebbe,” Brazilian director José Padilha risks sinking into a political quagmire.

This was the counter-terrorism operation in the summer of 1976 which saw Israeli special forces fly thousands of miles to Uganda to rescue passengers (many of them Israelis) who had been aboard an Air France flight hijacked by militants fighting for the liberation of Palestine. It was a daring and extremely risky mission.

The challenge for Padilha and his collaborators is how to tell this story without lapsing into mindless, propagandistic action-movie cliché. To their credit, they try not just to celebrate the derring-do of the Israeli rescuers but to give the point of view of the two hapless, idealistic German militants who orchestrated the hijacking.

This is a thoughtful and well-acted film but one strangely lacking in the tension that might have been expected in a thriller in which the clock is running. The screenplay by Gregory Burke (who also wrote the brilliant Northern Ireland-set drama ’71) is generally even-handed in its portrayal of the politicians, soldiers, and civilians caught up in the hijacking. It has omissions, though.

The title is Entebbe and the film is largely set in the airport in the Ugandan town where the hostages are in captivity but this is an Arab-Israeli story.

The filmmakers pay next to no attention to the Ugandans themselves other than to show the vainglorious Ugandan dictator Idi Amin strutting across the screen from time to time. He supports the hijackers. Intertitles over the end credits reveal that dozens of Ugandans died during the operation but their stories are ignored entirely.

Rosamund Pike is cast as Brigitte Kuhlmann, one of those radicalised, middle-class young German revolutionaries who emerged in the 1970s. “Anybody who tries to resist me will be shot,” she yells at one stage but Pike plays her as someone struggling to convince herself that she knows how to shoot a gun and really is ready to die for the cause.

With her long hair and big round spectacles, she looks more like an Open University lecturer than a freedom fighter. She is the type who will preach world revolution one moment but fret about her hostages getting proper bathroom breaks the next.

Late in the film, when she becomes increasingly strung out and starts popping pills, she develops a bit of a Lady Macbeth syndrome. Her sanity wavers. In one bizarre sequence, she wanders away from the terminal where the hostages are in captivity to make a private telephone call, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she is in the middle of a terrorist standoff.

The other German hijacker, Daniel Brühl’s Wilfried Böse, is equally impractical. He talks in Marxist-Leninist abstractions about throwing “bombs into the consciousness of the masses” and seems startled when the ruggedly practical Air France engineer (Denis Ménochet) suggests that the best way to free the people is to give them decent plumbing.

Brühl plays him as a naive idealist, desperate to make it clear to the hostages, even as they are put right in the eye of the storm, that he is no Nazi. The two German terrorists protest, a little absurdly, that they don’t want to hurt anyone and that they are “humanitarians”. It’s easy to understand why their battle-hardened Palestinian colleagues regard them with such incredulity.

Some of the most enjoyable scenes here are those back in Israel, where Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi), Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) and the rest of the country’s cabinet are deliberating about how to how to deal with the hijacking.

The situation may be fraught but Ashkenazi and Marsan still chatter and bicker away as if they are Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in some Odd Couple-style comedy.

In his TV work, notably Narcos (about drugs baron Pablo Escobar) and The Mechanism (about political corruption in Brazil), Padilha excels at delving into the private lives of his characters. The best moments tend not to be the shootouts or police busts but the scenes which show the larger-than-life protagonists at their most exposed and vulnerable.

At feature length, Entebbe doesn’t give him the time to focus on character in the same way. A strange framing story involving a young Israeli soldier and his dancer girlfriend doesn’t help. For no particular reason, the film cuts back and forth between the raid on Entebbe (“Operation Thunderbolt”) and the Pina Bausch-style performance piece she and her troupe are preparing.

The Entebbe story has been told on screen several times before, generally in a very simple-minded, high-testosterone fashion. Padilha’s version is easily the most complex. That is part of its problem. It’s a thriller movie that spends too much time looking inward.

Like the two naive German revolutionaries, the filmmakers are always trying to justify and explain their approach. The film is absorbing enough in its own terms but ends up caught in a no man’s land between character-based political drama and explosive action-adventure.

Entebbe hits UK cinemas 11 May.