7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE (US/UK - 2018) Directed by Jose Padilha. Written by Gregory Burke. Cast: Daniel Bruhl, Rosamund Pike, Eddie Marsan, Denis Menochet, Lior Ashkenazi, Ben Schnetzer, Brontis Jodorowsky, Nonso Anozie, Mark Ivanir, Angel Bonnani, Peter Sullivan, Andrea Deck, Natalie Stone, Vincent Riotta, Trudy Weiss. (PG-13, 107 mins) Operation Thunderbolt, the Israel Defense Forces' successful July 4, 1976 raid of Entebbe Airport in Uganda to rescue hostages being held by the far left German Revolutionary Cells and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine stands as one of the most daring military missions in history. It immediately spawned two competing, hastily-shot, all-star TV-movie "events" with ABC's VICTORY AT ENTEBBE (with Anthony Hopkins, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Richard Dreyfuss, Helmut Berger, Linda Blair, and Elizabeth Taylor among others) airing just five months later in December, quickly followed by NBC's RAID ON ENTEBBE (headlined by Charles Bronson, Yaphet Kotto, Martin Balsam, Horst Bucholz, John Saxon, and Peter Finch in his last film) in early January 1977. Future Cannon heads Menaham Golan and Yoram Globus even got into the act, with the Golan-directed Israeli production OPERATION THUNDERBOLT (with Klaus Kinski and Sybil Danning as the hijackers) hitting theaters in January 1977. The Entebbe raid is also touched upon in other films, like THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND and the epic CARLOS, and now, over 40 years later, 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE is yet another take on the same subject.
On June 27, 1976, Germans Wilfried "Boni" Bose (Daniel Bruhl) and Brigitte Kuhlmann (Rosamund Pike), two members of Revolutionary Cells, board an Air France jet during a layover in Athens, en route from Tel Aviv to Paris. They and some accomplices commandeer the plane and force pilot Capt. Michel Bacos (Brontis Jodorowsky, best known as the little boy in his dad Alejandro's 1970 cult classic EL TOPO) and navigator Jacques Le Moine (Denis Menochet, looking like he's auditioning for THE NICK OFFERMAN STORY) to reroute to Benghazi, Libya to refuel en route to Entebbe, Uganda, where dictator Idi Amin (Nonso Anozie) has granted them an airstrip at Entebbe Airport. The pro-Palestine Bose and Kuhlmann are far-left ideologues, with Kuhlmann a protege of incarcerated and recently-deceased Red Army Faction leader Ulrike Meinhof, who was found hanged in her cell in what was deemed a suicide but many in German terrorist circles feel was a staged execution. Once the plane lands in Entebbe and Amin gives them passage, the days drag on and as the unstable Kuhlmann keeps popping amphetamines and Bose begins to resent that the Palestinian cohorts who were waiting for them at Entebbe--under the orders of PFLO leader Wadie Haddad--and begin to muscle the Germans aside and start separating the Israeli passengers, moving them to another room and threatening to begin killing them if Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) doesn't release all of the Palestinian terrorists being held in Israeli prisons.
The most compelling parts of 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE are the tense meetings with Rabin, the Israeli military, and testy Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres (a terrific performance by Eddie Marsan, sporting an amazing makeup job), and the debates over Israel's policy of never negotiating with terrorists (staunchly supported by Peres, who believes Rabin is deliberately stalling on a response in the hopes that he can just throw Peres under the bus). Less successful are the arcs of Bose and Kuhlmann. Pike can't do much with director Jose Padilha (ELITE SQUAD, NARCOS, and the ROBOCOP remake) and screenwriter Gregory Burke ('71) whittling her complex character--who blames herself for Meinhof's death--down to a stock "crazy bitch" act that culminates in a ridiculous scene where she calls her lover and pours her heart and her belief in the cause out to him in a long monologue on a pay phone that's not even functioning. The filmmakers don't give a pass to the Germans, but definitely want to engineer some sympathy for them as two idealistic young activists who get in way over their heads, though in one flashback scene, a Revolutionary Cells associate who's trying to talk them out of the hijacking does call Bose out as a bit of a poseur who likes to rant about oppression and the evils of capitalism while owning a small but financially successful publishing company ("You're not oppressed! You're a capitalist!" the guy yells). During the real seven days at Entebbe, Bose apparently did express some concern over the optics of being a German in a hostage situation where Israelis were being threatened with execution, but 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE almost seems like it wants to absolve him of any wrongdoing. If Bose (and, to an extent Kuhlmann, who starts to realize they screwed up when she runs out of pills and is able to clear her head a little) really felt this way as the situation escalated way beyond the statement they wanted to make, it would hardly be the last time ideologically pure and stubbornly uncompromising far-left activists were duped into being the useful idiots that a powerful political organization requires to roll out a far more insidious plan.
For about 85 of its 107 minutes, 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE is a generally involving hostage/political thriller despite some occasional tap-dancing around certain issues and the puzzling omission of key details, like the whole situation with elderly hostage Dora Bloch (briefly seen in a couple of scenes and played by Trudy Weiss), her disappearance during the ordeal and how her Amin-ordered execution is never even addressed. But in the home stretch, as the raid is underway (one of the commanders, and the only Israeli military officer killed during Operation Thunderbolt, was Yonatan Netanyahu--played here by Angel Bonnani--the older brother of current PM Benjamin Netanyahu), Padilha completely shits the bed by intercutting it with some footage of Israel's Batsheva Dance Company. One of the soldiers (Ben Schnetzer) is called to duty and will miss the opening night performance of his dancer girlfriend (Andrea Deck). We see the dance outfit practicing throughout and Operation Thunderbolt is intercut with their performance, with the girlfriend repeatedly falling flat on her face time and again. It's a mystery whether that's a metaphor for something happening with the raid or for Padilha himself, but it completely drains the suspense from what should be the key sequence in the film. Even the closing credits play over some dance routine with a male dancer contorting throughout the frame while a female dancer runs in place in the background. It's one of the all-time climactic derailments of what was an otherwise decent movie up to that point. Sure, it was sort-of an acceptably second-string MUNICH but Padilha's bizarre decision to turn it into what looks like snippets of a justifiably abandoned production of "Bob Fosse's ENTEBBE!" is thus far the head-scratcher of the year for 2018 moviegoing. Sure, the out-of-nowhere violent sex scene near the end of MUNICH was jarring, but it didn't instantly turn the film into a hot mess.
THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX (US - 2018) Directed by Julius Onah. Written by Oren Uziel. Cast: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Bruhl, John Ortiz, Chris O'Dowd, Aksel Hennie, Zhang Ziyi, Elizabeth Debicki, Roger Davies, Clover Nee, Donal Logue, Suzanne Cryer, voices of Ken Olin, Simon Pegg, Greg Grunberg. (Unrated, 102 mins) Though word began leaking online before it was official, Netflix pulled off one of the more ingenious marketing events in recent memory by running a trailer for THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX during the Super Bowl and then making it available to stream immediately following the game. Whether this release strategy is the "game changer" that many were inclined to call it remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX is not. Shot two years ago under the title GOD PARTICLE, and turned into a CLOVERFIELD movie by producer J.J. Abrams very late in production--a move that necessitated rewrites and reshoots (2016's 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE was also a pre-existing script retrofitted into the tenuous CLOVERFIELD universe)--THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX (also called CLOVERFIELD STATION at one time) was originally set to be released in February 2017, but Paramount kept shuffling it around, unable to settle on a date. It was first moved to fall 2017, then February 2018, and finally April 2018, but in recent weeks, the studio canceled the theatrical release and decided to sell it to Netflix, a move very similar to the release plan for Alex Garland's upcoming ANNIHILATION, which is debuting on Netflix everywhere in the world except North America and China later in February. Paramount said that test audiences found ANNIHILATION "too intellectual," so perhaps they're skittish about losing money on it, but no such excuse was given for THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX. No, the reason they pawned this off is obvious: it's just terrible.
The film opens on Earth as scientist Ava Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, from the BLACK MIRROR episode "San Junipero") and her husband Michael (Roger Davies) are still grieving the loss of their two children in a fire. The world is in the midst of an energy crisis and Ava has a chance to be part of a several-year mission aboard the Cloverfield space station to ignite the Shepard particle accelerator which, if successful, will replenish the planet's energy supply. Michael encourages her to go and the film cuts to two years later. British Ava is aboard the station with an international crew: American commander Kiel (David Oyelowo), German Schmidt (Daniel Bruhl), Russian Volkov (Aksel Hennie), Irish Mundy (Chris O'Dowd), Brazilian Acosta (John Ortiz), and Chinese Tam (Zhang Ziyi), who speaks only in subtitled Mandarin but is perfectly understood by the English-speaking crew in one of the more cumbersome concessions to the lucrative Asian market you'll see this year. Tensions at home between Germany and Russia are reflected in a throwdown between Schmidt and anger management case Volkov, but that gets sidelined after a systems overload causes them to lose contact with Earth. Strange things start to occur: a stowaway named Jensen (Elizabeth Debicki) is found behind a panel with the electrical wiring fused with her body and the volatile Volkov barfs a geyser of worms and dies. Jensen claims to be a member of the crew even though no one knows her. She even says she knows Ava from the academy and that Ava is currently a civilian coordinator working at the command center on Earth, and warns them all "Don't trust Schmidt." Physicist Schmidt concludes that they've entered another dimension and they're currently traversing what he calls "two distinct realities fighting to occupy the same space, creating chaos," a perfect metaphor for trying to shoehorn CLOVERFIELD into an existing script. In one reality, Ava is part of the Cloverfield crew and in another, she's on Earth and her kids are still alive. Both realities are duking it out and things get even more complicated when they enter a third reality, and I haven't even mentioned Mundy's arm being severed and dragging itself around the ship like something out of an old horror movie, even writing cryptic warnings like "Cut open Volkov," after which they find the ship's missing gyroscope hidden in his stomach.
THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX sounds insane enough to be entertaining, but it's an absolute mess. Mbatha-Raw turns in a solid performance, but she can't overcome the obstacles working against her. There's no dramatic momentum, it's excruciatingly dull, plot threads are unexplored or abandoned (there's a lot of time spent cutting to Michael on Earth, where he's rescued a little girl and seems to be taking refuge in John Goodman's 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE bunker), Mundy's comic relief falls flat ("What are ya talkin' about, arm?" he pleads with his severed arm), and at some point, Jensen becomes the villain but the hows and whys are maddeningly vague. Writer Oren Uziel (22 JUMP STREET, SHIMMER LAKE) and director Julius Onah spend most of the film fashioning a throwback to space movies of the late '90s and early-to-mid '00s like EVENT HORIZON, SUNSHINE, HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE and the VHS obscurity THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, with a tacked-on "Hey, let's make it a CLOVERFIELD movie!" ending that looks like it was lifted directly from last year's LIFE. The stowaway saboteur element with Debicki's Jensen plays exactly like Peter Facinelli's villain in the megabomb SUPERNOVA, and speaking of, the infamously troubled SUPERNOVA is probably a better and more coherent movie than THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX. The abrupt ending and final shot seem arbitrary, with no real rhyme or reason to what makes up the CLOVERFIELD universe (the thought process behind these movies is the same as when Dimension wedged Pinhead into a bunch of existing scripts to make all those DTV HELLRAISER sequels a decade and a half ago), and while it tries to tie in the events of the first film from way back in the halcyon days of found footage in 2008, it doesn't seem to be following its own internal history. There's no master plan to the CLOVERFIELD franchise--they're just movies that become CLOVERFIELD movies at some point near the end of production. Abrams could just throw a random giant monster into the very last shot of PHANTOM THREAD and call it CLOVERFIELD THREAD and it would be just as valid an entry into the series as PARADOX. With over a year's worth of delayed release dates resulting in a surprise Netflix dumping advertised during one of the most-watched television events of the year, there's no denying the smart salesmanship behind the unveiling of THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX. At the same time, there's also no denying that Paramount clearly knew they stepped in a pile of shit and didn't want to be the ones standing there when everyone started to notice the stench.
