Review: Hijacking Thriller '7500 ' Never Gets Off the Ground

What do you get when you take an airplane hijacking movie, but the hijacking isn't actually the focal point of the film? That's the predicament audiences will find themselves with the new Amazon film "7500." Forgoing the traditional route, the filmmakers opt for an intimate character study.

The film's title, "7500," refers to a code that pilots can use on a plane to covertly let ground control know that the plane has been hijacked. In the case here, it is a flight from Berlin to Paris that gets taken over shortly after takeoff. After the plane's pilot is killed during the initial rush for the cockpit, co-pilot Tobias Ellis (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is left to try to maintain control of the plane and safely land it back on the ground. He must do all of this while dealing with a wound that leaves his left arm basically useless.

It sounds like the set up for a suspenseful thriller set at 35,000 feet. Alas, "Air Force One" this is not.

Taking place in real time, the film isn't much concerned with creating much tension from the situation. In fact, filmmaker Patrick Vollrath only spends a small portion of the film on the plane actually being hijacked. The first 15 minutes shows, in more detail than anyone other than aviation aficionados will ever care to see, the pre-flight routine that pilots go through before passengers ever board. He doesn't even make good use of the time to flesh out his characters. The final act is basically a two-person character study between Tobias and one of the hijackers.

Vollrath, who also wrote the script, thankfully keeps the film to a trim 92 minutes. But he has fixed his camera on Tobias, rather than trying to build the world of the entire plane. Other than two people who barely make the flight, none of the passengers are ever given a second thought.

Much of the tension is lost by focusing solely on Tobias' plight. The only view as to what is happening outside of the cockpit is a small television monitor that lets the pilots see who are outside their cockpit door. A curtain is even pulled so that we aren't given a glimpse of what is happening in other parts of the plane or what the passengers might be going through during the ordeal.

Just when you think that things can't sink any lower, one of the terrorists decides to relieve himself in the cockpit and demands that Tobias close his eyes while he's doing the deed. It's not even that he goes to the bathroom just anywhere – no, he climbs into the captain's chair to do so.

Possibly the most frustrating part of "7500" is that during much of the final act there is an attempt to humanize one of the hijackers. He gets cold feet about their mission when he gets second thoughts about dying. The attempt to humanize fails, though, because for every step forward he takes two backwards. The whole exercise feels tedious and a little bit icky to watch.

Despite its short run time, watching "7500" becomes a lesson in patience. Tobias makes many dumb decisions – chiefly only attempting to knock out and tie up a hijacker with medical tape after the man gets into the cockpit and killing the pilot.

With almost no character development and most of the film taking place inside the cockpit, the filmmakers created a tomb in which they left their movie to slowly die. Gordon-Levitt is the only redeeming thing about the movie, but at times he seems to just be going through the motions. "7500" never gets off the ground.