7500

7500. Pilot code for a hijacking. We've seen loads of these onscreen over the years and usually there's someone like Chuck Norris, Liam Neeson or Harrison Ford on-hand to deal with the bad guys and save the day. Even Dirty Harry Callaghan polished off a team of hijackers and saved the day once. It's a nightmare scenario. Trapped in a tube, 5 miles up, going at 600 miles per hour with someone pointing something pointy and bloodied at you. A stressful enough situation for the passengers but what about the pilots? These movies have always treated the pilots as expendable, wiped out in the opening minutes of the attack. But what if the pilots survived? What then?

Tobias Ellis (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is on his way from Berlin to Paris. An experienced pilot with 10 years behind him, this is just another day on the job. His girlfriend Gökce (Aylin Tezel) is onboard as an air hostess but at work they like to keep things professional. Tobias's co-pilot is Michael (Carlo Kitzlinger), an older pilot who's getting sick of his job. It's their first night working together and it should be plain (plane ahaha sorry) sailing, until a group of men armed with broken glass bottles storm the cockpit and seriously injure the elder cockpit inhabitant.

7500 is an assured debut from director Patrick Vollrath. Some CCTV footage at the start aside the film stays in the cockpit from the moment Tobias enters until the credits roll and it makes for a desperately claustophobic watch. Almost unbearably so at times. This is no frills B-movie stuff but that doesn't make it any less worthy of a watch because it had me gnawing on my hand for the majority of its running time. It feels like a movie Hitchcock would make if he was around now. In one location, in real time, about an ordinary bloke in the wrong place at the wrong time, the hijacker's demands never known, a mere macguffin to get the movie rolling. With everything extraneous pushed to one side we can just concentrate on the story of one professional dealing with a situation in the best way he knows how.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt ain't the first person you'd imagine in a movie like this but he does well as a man reacting realistically to a situation he's been trained to deal with all his working life. You might be roaring at him to do what you think is right but fair play to him and the story, he never makes the easy decision and suffers mightily as a result and we get a movie and an ending that feels that bit more authentic than usual. There's a couple of moments that might stretch credulity but there's very little here that feels Hollywood. Not surprisingly really seeing as it's a co-production between Germany, Austrian and American studios. Gritty euro-realism is so 2020 don't you know.

Apart from Tobias the rest of the cast is thinly sketched out. Gökce feels like she's onboard to give Tobias a personal stake in proceedings and one hijacker notwithstanding the rest might as well be wearing masks. The days of the Islamist hijacker feel like they should be over at this stage and its something that knocks some of the sheen off a well made thriller. An effort to humanise one of them, the young and frightened Vedat (Omid Memar in a believable turn), at least separates this from earlier, cringier takes on an hoary old trope.

One rather large issue aside 7500 is a solid, well acted thriller and a committed turn from JGL lifts it above most of the tosh that's debuted online in the last couple of months. If you're looking for 90 minutes of anxiety inducing viewing you'llenjoy this. You might rethink that foreign holiday you're planning though.

7500 is streaming on Amazon prime right now.