Lior Ashkenazi – Memphis Flyer

It’s not often that you get to see the making of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode in real time, but I feel confident that at some point a guy in a movie theater with a couple of robots is going to make fun of Seven Days In Entebbe.

Mossad commandos stroll casually into battle in Seven Days In Entebbe

This film, directed by José Padilha, is the fourth made about the June-July 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane by a combined force of Palestinian and German terrorists. The plane was flown from Athens, Greece to an airport in Entebbe, Uganda on the shores of Lake Victoria. There, the 254 passengers and crew were held hostage with the help of Idi Amin’s army. The terrorists demanded the release of prisoners from Israeli jails, but instead they all got bullets in the head from a force of Israeli commandos. All but one of the passengers were rescued in the daring raid, and the men behind it—Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Defense Minister Shimon Peres—became national heroes. Even today in Israel, the events of that summer have repercussions: The only Israeli casualty was the brother of current Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

Regret-filled passengers file from the plane.

The first of Seven Days In Entebbe’s many faults lies in its attempts to tell all sides of the story at once, and failing in every respect. Rosamund Pike and Daniel Brul play Brigitte Kuhlmann and Wilfred Bose, a pair of radical Red Army guerrillas who led the mission. Kuhlmann and Bose were the last of the breed of militant leftists who grew out of the 1960s. Their comrades in the infamous Badher-Meinhof group were all dead or in prison, and since they were stuck in a Libyan training camp with no prospect of returning home alive, the hijacking was an act of desperation.

Daniel Bruhl and Rosamund Pike hijack a plane because they have nothing better to do.

The hijacking goes smoothly enough, but the passengers, all decked out for the 1970s, appear to have been imported directly from an Airport movie. The self-parody is completed with Denis Menochet as the no nonsense flight engineer, who would have been played by George Kennedy if this had really been 1976. He gets great lines like “A plumber is worth five revolutionaries!”

On the other side is the Israeli government, led by Lior Ashkenazi as Rabin and Eddie Marsan as Peres. The pair of politicians leave no cigarette unsmoked and no brow un-furrowed, but at no time are they believable human beings. Even worse is the shoddy looking defense ministry headquarters, which looks like a 1960s-era Doctor Who set where everyone tells each other what they already know, unconvincingly. Most pointless of all is a subplot where a young commando played by Ben Schnetzer has to miss his girlfriend’s godawful modern dance performance because he’s off rescuing hostages. The only person who looks like he’s having any fun in the entire movie is Game of Thrones vet Nonso Anozie, and I suspect that’s because his portrayal of Idi Amin is secretly a Donald Trump impersonation.

Seven Days In Entebbe jumps out in front in the race for the most pointless (least pointed?) film of the year so far. Padilha is an acclaimed action director who somehow forgot how to film a good action scene since his uneven Robocop remake. His film failed to make me care about the passengers, the hijackers, the decision makers, or the soldiers. The only question is, why would anyone pay good money to remake a Charles Bronson TV movie from the 1970s, and do it so badly at that? For that, I have no answers. But one day, someone’s going to thank them for the lulz.

The word “entrepreneur” has its roots in a French word that originally meant something like “go-between.” By that definition, Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere) is a consummate entrepreneur. He runs the consulting firm Oppenheimer Strategies —rather, he is the consulting firm Oppenheimer Strategies. We first meet him, white iPhone earbuds in place, mapping out social connections on a Starbucks napkin. He’s trying to land a $300 million deal for …something. We’re not quite sure what. And neither are any of the people he gets on the other end of the phone.

But Norman doesn’t seem to get discouraged, even as door after door is slammed in his face. When his nephew Philip Cohen (Michael Sheen) describes contacting one of his billionaire targets, Jo Wilf (Harris Yulin), as “a drowning man waving to get the attention of an ocean liner,” Norman replies that he is “a very good swimmer, as long as I have my head above water.”

Norman’s consulting business basically consists of his trying to bring people together — he even consults with other consultants, he brags. But the biggest problem is, he doesn’t add much value to the deal. Whatever water he used to carry in New York is long dried up. Now, he’s just an old widower living by his wits, waiting for his luck to run out.

Richard Gere plays the titular role in Joseph Cedar’s Norman.

But then, Norman is hit with one final stroke of luck. After talking his way into an international oil-and-gas exploration conference, he sets his sights on Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi), a Deputy Minister of Trade and Labor for the Israeli government who seems to be on the way out of government. The plan is to use Micha’s name to get a foot in the door with billionaire Arthur Taub (Josh Charles) and to use Taub’s name to get Micha’s attention. Both parties think Norman is friends with the other party, and he plays the two off of each other for influence.

If this plot is sounding unbelievably convoluted to you, that means you’ve got a good handle on Norman (full title: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer). The film is at its best in the early stages, when Gere as Norman serves as a sort of tour guide through the corridors of elite New York wealth and power. People in fine suits are unfailingly cordial, until they sense that Norman is no use to them and throw him out. That all changes when, after a story break of three years, Micha’s luck turns and he becomes Prime Minister of Israel. With a single warm hug at a state reception, people are giving Norman their card instead of the other way around. And that, of course, is when Norman gets himself in way over his head. What Norman thinks of as favors for an old friend, Israeli federal law enforcement officer Alex Green (Charlotte Gainsbourg) thinks of as illegal influence peddling.

Israeli-American writer/director Joseph Cedar has crafted a story that lies somewhere between The Manchurian Candidate and the Bill Murray/Richard Dreyfuss comedy What About Bob? His biggest directorial challenge is making scene after scene of Richard Gere talking on his omnipresent iPhone visually interesting, and he goes far beyond the conventional split screen by digitally blending the halls of power with whatever random Office Depot the borderline-destitute Norman happens to be drifting through at the moment. Gere, for his part, is at least taking the role seriously. He shares some crackerjack scenes with Steve Buscemi as a pugilistic rabbi and Hank Azaria as a younger hustler who latches onto Norman late in the proceedings. But still, none of that can overcome the fact that Norman is a fairly innocuous film. Its highs are not very high, its laughs never grow beyond a chuckle, and its lows leave you with a shrug rather than a tear. It’s good to see original ideas and mature, politically sophisticated subject matter get a chance in contemporary Hollywood, but simple competence isn’t enough to make Norman more than a passing curiosity.