4th TIMES THE CHARM? 7 Days in Entebbe (2018)

                

                 “7 Days in Entebbe” (also known as “Entebbe”) is the fourth movie to tell the tale of the Israeli raid to rescue hostages held by terrorists in Entebbe, Uganda.  The others were “Victory at Entebbe”, “Raid on Entebbe”, and “Operation Thunderbolt”.  The most recent of those was made over forty years ago.  All are based on Operation Thunderbolt or Operation Entebbe.  This movie was directed by Jose Padhilla.  The screenplay used Saul David’s book Operation Thunderbolt as its source.

                On June 27, 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris is hijacked by two German terrorists named Wilfried Bose (Daniel Bruhl) and Bridgette Kuhlmann (Rosamund Pike).  They and two Palestinians took over the plane in midflight, taking the crew and over 200 passengers hostage.   They land in Libya to refuel, where Bose allows a woman who feigns a miscarrying pregnancy to be released.  The airliner moves on to Entebbe, Uganda where the terrorists expect support from notoriously anti-Israeli tyrant Idi Amin.  They are not disappointed.  The Jews and non-Jews are separated in the terminal and Bose and Kuhlmann demand that the Israeli government pay $5 million and release 53 prisoners.  Bose is the idealist.  He is not a Nazi!  Kuhlmann is the tougher of the two.  The Israeli government must decide whether to negotiate or rescue.  Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Defense Minister Shimon Peres represent the two options.  Rabin argues for negotiating and Peres is in favor of direct action to free the hostages.  Meanwhile, Bose and Kuhlmann argue reality versus revolution.  You don’t need a spoiler alert to know that the Israeli’s go with the kick-ass commando rescue option.  This means prepare for intercutting between the government deliberations, the treatment of the hostages, and the planning and training for the mission.  The commando arc concentrates on a conflicted soldier and his dancer girlfriend.  The movie builds to the raid which is framed with a modern interpretive dance routine.  This device does separate the film from the other three movies.

                If you are going to make a fourth movie about an historical event, you better bring something new and better to the table.  This movie does not do that.  Since the other three were made soon after the event, you could thank the producers for updating the story and presenting it to an audience that might not be aware of the event.  Unfortunately, “7 Days in Entebbe” squanders its opportunity with stilted story-telling.  It is unengaging.  This is a major flaw in a movie that depicts one of the great raids in history.  It does stick to the facts for the most part, but lacks the suspense that a good documentary would have.  Since its not a documentary, we should get inside the heads of Bose and Kuhlmann.  All we get is the typical psychobabble common to action movies.  Bruhl and Pike are hot actors, but their performances don’t justify their new status.  The passion is not there and it doesn’t help that Bose and Kuhlmann are both written as blah characters.  The back and forth between the government officials is standard fare and boring since we know there will be a raid.  So we spend the whole time waiting for the big payoff.  And it’s not big.

                The biggest problem with movies like this is the more fidelity to the facts, the less entertainment value.  You can go the “Braveheart” route and say to Hell with the historians, or you can go the “Tora! Tora! Tora!” route and be accused of boring your audience.  “Entebbe” leans more toward avoiding artistic license.  This makes the raid commendably accurate, but seemingly easy and unsuspenseful.  And the framing device using the dance is a misfire.  You won’t care about the passengers because none are developed and the cursory attempts to develop empathy for Bose and Kuhlmann is misplaced considering the audience for the movie.  Since 9/11, we don’t want to understand what makes terrorists tick, we want the visceral thrill of seeing the best country in dealing with them do their anti-terrorist thing.

GRADE  =  C-

HISTORICAL ACCURACY:   The movie takes a few liberties with the facts.  Nothing that would cause a historian to foam at the mouth.  Kuhlman was more brutal than the cool customer of the movie.  Bose is accurately depicted personality-wise.  Kuhlmann did not phone her British boy friend from Entebbe.  Rabin and Peres did hold the positions shown in the film.  The chronology is basically as it was.  The takeover was as shown.  One of the passengers did fake a miscarriage to get freed.  The passengers were divided, but it was based on Israeli Jews versus non-Israeli Jews.  The movie perpetuates the myth that the airline crew volunteered to stay with the hostages, when actually they were given no choice.  The planning and training for the raid is realistic.  The main soldier character is fictional, as is his girlfriend.  Choosing to make the soldier a conflicted one is not exactly representing the majority of the commandoes.  They did use a black Mercedes to fool the guards into thinking it was Amin.  Unfortunately, that night the guards were aware that they great leader had switched to a white one, so they challenged the Israelis.  Against orders, and with what could have been disastrous results, the guards were silenced, but this ended the surprise.  The rescue of the hostages was anticlimactic because Bose refused to open fire on the hostages and another terrorist was shot immediately, but not before a hostage was hit in the crossfire.  The other two hostages that died were killed by friendly fire.  The other terrorists, including Kuhlmann, were tracked down in other parts of the terminal.  The firefight with the Ugandan soldiers occurred mainly during the egress.  Some of them were in the control tower as shown.  One of these was the man who killed the mission leader Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu (Benjamin’s older brother).  Netanyahu was not killed early as in the film.  The movie does not depict the destruction of parked MiGs on the airstrip to prevent pursuit.   In a post script not mentioned in the film, the fourth hostage victim was not killed in the raid.  Dora Block had been taken to a hospital because a bone got caught in her throat.  Idi Amin had her murdered in revenge for the success of the mission.