7500 – Movie Review [Amazon’s Prime Video] (2/5)

7500 is a new thriller on Prime Video. It’s an Amazon Original starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a pilot who experiences a hijacking by terrorists. The runtime is just 92 minutes but it feels much longer. Read our full 7500 review here and check it out on Amazon’s Prime Video!

7500 is a new Amazon Original thriller on Prime Video. Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as the pilot who experiences a hijacking by terrorists. If you’ve watched the trailer, you should be able to sense the energy and intensity of the story.

However, please be advised that the trailer only shows part of what this movie is about. It has elements of absolute slow-burn to an excruciating degree as well. Also, it is full of stereotypes and an all too predictable story.

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

Continue reading our full 7500 movie review below.

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