This hijack drama’s too even-handed by half

Film Entebbe 12A cert, 107 min Dir José Padilha Starring Daniel Brühl, Rosamund Pike, Eddie Marsan, Denis Ménochet, Lior Ashkenazi, Ben Schnetzer, Nonso Anozie

‘Ifight so you can dance,” a young commando (Schnetzer) tells his anxious girlfriend (Zina Zinchenko) before the shooting finally breaks out in Entebbe, a dramatisation of the already-much-dramatised 1976 hijacking of Air France flight 139, and the hair-raising Israeli rescue effort.

But as far as the film is concerned, she dances so he can fight. In an attempt to smooth out this coagulated period thriller, director José Padilha occasionally cuts away from the action to a startling interpretative dance number on stage in Tel Aviv, in which the soldier’s girlfriend has a major part. It’s presumably to remind us of the web of lives, military, political and civilian, that become ensnared in an attack like the hijacking, in which pro-palestinian German terrorists held more than 100 hostages for a week at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, after commandeering an aircraft en route from Israel to France. But you wish you were watching a film about the dance company instead.

This is a shame, and pretty baffling too: Padilha and his screenwriter Gregory Burke should have been ideal collaborators for the project. On the ground, everything is desperately downbeat and earnest with German militants Wilfried (Brühl) and Brigitte (Pike). Then, more interestingly, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (Ashkenazi) and defence minister Shimon Peres (Marsan, the best thing here) attempt to thrash out some kind of fast solution that won’t entail ceding any hard-won geopolitical ground.

But the film’s determination to remain politically even-handed robs much of the drama of any sense of urgency or purpose. With no one to root for, the action itself is sluggishly uninvolving, while the stand-off leading up to it is treated much like a correspondence chess match, of interest purely in terms of strategy, with no sense that innocent lives are at stake.

“They called themselves freedom fighters. The Israelis called them terrorists,” the opening titles announce. It might as well be followed by: “Hey, don’t look at us.”