Joseph Gordon-Levitt engages in a tense standoff in Amazon’s hijacking thriller 7500

7500 is the upcoming thriller from German director Patrick Vollrath, and co-written with Senad Halilbasic, and marks his feature debut following his Oscar nomination in 2015 for his short film Alles wird gut.

It’s also the first time in four years that we’ll see the always-excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a full-length feature since 2016’s Straight Outta Oz. He stars as the co-pilot of a routine commercial flight from Berlin to Paris that becomes the target of an attempted hijacking, which results in a tense standoff between himself and the increasingly-violent hijackers.

The official plot synopsis is as follows:

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.

Let’s take a look:

I’m on the fence here. Like I said above, Gordon-Levitt is an excellent actor and he’s giving yet another good performance here – but I don’t really see much more to this movie. The moral dilemma he faces – whether to cede control of the aircraft to the hijackers in order to save the lives of the passengers in the short term versus the knowledge that the hijackers will something far worse in store and those passengers would likely not survive that either – is definitely an intriguing one. There doesn’t seem to be anything more to the plot than this though, which to me isn’t enough to drag out for ninety-odd minutes.

What do you think?

7500 will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on 19 June. It also stars Carlo Kitzlinger, Aylin Tezel, Aurélie Thépaut, Omid Memar, Murathan Muslu, and Paul Wollin.

Last Updated: June 11, 2020