Code Known: Gordon-Levitt Shines in Intense Procedural Thriller from Vollrath

We’ve seen plenty of big budget Hollywood films dealing with airplane hijackings, to which sensitivity towards has perhaps been tempered in the two decades since 9/11. Germany’s Patrick Vollrath concocts something more intimate and, therefore, incredibly anxiety-inducing with his novel, bare-bones approach in his debut 7500, titled for the transponder code indicating a hijacking.

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a Berlin based American co-pilot on a flight taken over from Islamist terrorists in transit from Berlin to Paris, the single setting procedural might arguably depend on stereotyping of its antagonists but is efficient and effective with its harrowing intentions.

Shortly after they embark on what promises to be a brief, routine flight, Captain Michael Lutzmann (Carlo Kitzlinger) and co-pilot Tobias Ellis (Gordon-Levitt) are accosted in the cockpit by two members of an amateur terrorist cell which has boarded their flight with the intent to crash land into a populated area. While the captain is mortally wounded, they are able to subdue one assailant and lock the others out, guided by ground control to make an emergency landing in Hanover. But three remaining hijackers remain aggressively incessant about gaining entrance to the cockpit and begin to execute passengers, eventually accosting the flight attendants, one of whom (Aylin Tezel) is married to Tobias.

We aren’t allowed much time with any of the characters besides superficial details outside of the present, a reality which hobbles the characterization of the two terrorists with speaking roles, particularly Omid Memar’s naïve Vedat, whose anguish and desperation only instills the amateurish nature of their plan. Muruthan Muslu (recently in Pelican Blood, 2019) and Aylin Tezel manage to make an impression in their limited screen capacity, but this is Levitt’s show all the way.

Always a dependable presence, even when miscast in items like The Walk or Snowden, here he’s a formidable everyman whose actions thankfully remain realistic and empathetic, despite the film’s penchant for ramping up tension by slowing movements down. 7500 is along way off from blockbusters like Executive Decision or Non-Stop (though German director Robert Schwentke’s English debut Flightplan also features terrible happenings on a Berlin-based flight) but it compels with its intimate, sometimes unrelenting dread.

★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆