Entebbe

There’s a scene towards the end of this retro-styled polit­i­cal thriller from José ​“Robo­Cop (2014)” Padil­ha where Rosamund Pike’s Ger­man free­dom fight­er dials up her dis­tant lover from a pay­phone in a Ugan­dan air­port ter­mi­nal. The set­ting is Entebbe, 1976, and as she issues a weary yet defi­ant auf wieder­se­hen down the receiv­er, you can feel the weight of his­to­ry bear­ing down on her.

Then, in a twist that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Two Ron­nies sketch, Padil­ha and screen­writer Gre­go­ry Burke tor­pe­do the emo­tion­al cen­tre of their movie by hav­ing a kind­ly air­port secu­ri­ty guard inform Pike’s char­ac­ter that the tele­phone she’s using – the one she’s just poured her heart out into for two straight min­utes – is out of ser­vice, but she’s wel­come to try again from the bank of phones over in that corner.

It’s a baf­fling moment and evi­dence in micro­cosm of the film’s basic futil­i­ty. Because while Entebbe is a com­pe­tent enough drama­ti­sa­tion of the auda­cious hijack­ing of an Air France flight and the even more auda­cious res­cue mis­sion that fol­lowed, the wider sig­nif­i­cance of this true sto­ry is nev­er real­ly explored.

The film oper­ates chiefly as a char­ac­ter piece: on the one side is a group of left-wing rad­i­cals front­ed by Brigitte Kuhlmann (Pike) and Wil­fried Böse (Daniel Brühl); on the oth­er sits Israel’s top brass includ­ing Prime Min­is­ter Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashke­nazi) and Defence Min­is­ter Shi­mon Peres (Eddie Marsan, late for his The Death of Stal­in audi­tion); and in the mid­dle Non­so Anozie emphat­i­cal­ly steals the show as Uganda’s chuck­ly despot Idi Amin.

Owing to the high­ly sen­si­tive and ongo­ing nature of the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict, it’s per­haps under­stand­able that Padil­ha recon­structs this con­tro­ver­sial inci­dent with­out com­ment. As a result, though, it feels like an oppor­tu­ni­ty missed.