7500 is Prime Video 's new Amazon Original Thriller. Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars out as the pilot who is experiencing terrorist hijacking. If you've been watching the trailer you should be able to feel the story 's energy and intensity.

Please be told, however, that the trailer reveals only part of what this film is about. It also has absolute slow-burning elements to an excruciating degree. It is also full of stereotypes, and a story all too predictable.

Even though the runtime is just around an hour and a half, it feels much longer. Which is never a good thing.

Immersive and realistic

The beginning of 7500 works really well for me. It’s immersive and realistic with a plot that seems to play out virtually in realtime. Basically, it’s like you’re a shadow in the cockpit of the flight getting ready to fly from Berlin to Paris.

This continues for quite some time and even works well for the story as the hijacking itself takes place. Actually, it reminded me quite a lot of United 93, which was based on the real 9/11 hijacking of that flight.

However, where United 93 was an intense and fascinating look into a real-life tragedy, 7500 never really comes close to this level.

The hijacking itself takes place around 20 minutes into the runtime of the movie. Once this begins, we’re still in a good place as far as plot and characters go, but this does not last. Soon, the plot developments follow an all-too-familiar formula. You will know exactly what goes wrong because it’s everything you would expect.

Basically, if you imagine what silly trope would drive the plot forward, it’s the thing coming up in 7500. A damn shame, really!


The ultimate slow-burn ending

Once we reach a certain point of the hijacking, you would expect that the ending is coming soon. The intense and violent part of the story is pretty much over (do to some very natural developments), but then comes the ending. The most slow-burning ending, I can ever remember having to sit through.

It was not exactly where I thought we would end up after that crazy ride.

Sure, I’m fine with dealing with the aftermath of such an event, but that’s not really what happens. In fact, we never get to that point. Instead, we’re going through all the predictable stereotypes. Even the whole Muslim hijacker story was iffy (to say the least) for me from the get-go.

It just feels very American and this is a German movie, so it really wasn’t necessary to go that way. At least go for something different. Also, there is a lot of German spoken during this movie (as well as Turkish and other languages), but mostly it’s English.

Watch the 7500 movie on Amazon’s Prime Video now!

Patrick Vollrath directed and co-wrote 7500 which originally premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland back in August 2019. Since then, it did manage to screen at several other film festivals until the Corona crisis put a stop to pretty much everything.

Previously, Patrick Vollrath has directed several short films but this is the first feature film for the German director. As a short film director, he was nominated for an Academy Award in that category for the movie Alles wird gut (eng. title Everything will be Okay) from 2015. That short film did also win the “Small Golden Rail” at Cannes – along with many other awards.

The script was written with Senad Halilbasic, who is working on a German TV series titled Souls next. For me, the script of 7500 is its huge weakness. It’s predictable and the characters become grossly stereotypical in all the worst ways. I was not a fan of this movie overall, but the realistic and immersive parts of the movie is why it still lands on 2 out of 5.

7500 is out on Prime Video from June 18, 2020.



Details
Director: Patrick Vollrath
Writers: Patrick Vollrath, Senad Halilbasic
Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Carlo Kitzlinger, Murathan Muslu, Aurélie Thépaut, Aylin Tezel, Denis Schmidt, Passar Hariky, Omid Memar, Hicham Sebiai

Plot
It looks like a routine day at work for Tobias, a soft-spoken young American co-pilot on a flight from Berlin to Paris as he runs through the preflight checklist with Michael, the pilot, and chats with Gökce, his flight-attendant girlfriend. But shortly after takeoff, terrorists armed with makeshift knives suddenly storm the cockpit, seriously wounding Michael and slashing Tobias’ arm. Temporarily managing to fend off the attackers, a terrified Tobias contacts ground control to plan an emergency landing. But when the hijackers kill a passenger and threaten to murder more innocent people if he doesn’t let them back into the cockpit, this ordinary man faces an excruciating test.