7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE

7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE PURE FICTION

Film Review by FIORE

Revisionist history, and a fear of insulting Muslims.  Those are the driving forces behind this latest telling of the Israeli Army’s raid on a hijacked airliner by Palestinian terrorists.  This film, directed by Jose Padilha, is so misguided and fanciful, it is difficult to sit through the movie, especially for those who lived during the time and experienced the ordeal.

Screenwriter Gregory Burke pens a script that debases Jewish people and the nation of Israel, while attempting to elicit empathy for the Palestinians.  According to this scenario, it was German rebels who orchestrated the high jacking of the Air France jetliner. The Palestinian terrorists were tag- a- long freedom fighters. 

In order to comply with Hollywood’s Woman Warrior Agenda, the main German mastermind is a woman, Brigitte Kulhmann, played by Rosamund Pike.  She has an idealistic whipping boy in Wilfried Bose, played by Daniel Bruhl.  I like Rosamund a lot, but her talents are wasted in this excrement on celluloid.  The only notable performance comes from Eddie Marsan, who plays Shimon Peres.

There is a very cleaver cinematic sequence in the film’s conclusion.  Lula Carvalho mixes an Israeli dance performance with the raid on the airport hangar. It incorporates the heavy drum beats for gunshots, thereby lessening the violence of the attack and keeping the snowflakes appeased.  The timing by Editor Danie Rezende makes the sequence work. 

  

Part of the dribble viewers are subjected to in this story is the Nazis’ responsibility for the problems in the Middle East.  I kid you not.  In this script, the Nazis were cruel to the Jews, so when the Jews recovered, they retaliated on the Palestinians.  Yeah, even the “progressive critics” I attended the screening with were having a hard time with that one.

The film opens with a statement claiming the details of Entebbe were changed, and new characters were added for ‘dramatization’.  It’s more like total fabrication.  There is an unnecessary and inappropriate slam against current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the end of the movie.  It is so blatant and misplaced, one has the impression the entire movie 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE may have been made just for this one statement.

RAID ON ENTEBBE, with Charles Bronson, is an old TV mini-series that tells this story with more style and panache.  The attack on Palestinian terrorists in Entebbe established the Israeli special forces as one of the premiere squads in the world and established a no-nonsense response to terrorists, which many countries adopted afterwards.  Rewatch the Bronson series; skip this movie.