Review of 7 Days in Entebbe (2018) by Richard W — 06 Apr 2018

I saw this stinker today. I expected much more from this film and it was a huge letdown. As I had seen in some of the reviews, the director seems to be trying to find some moral equivalence between the terrorists and the Israelis.

There are a lot more things wrong with this, however. The IDF commando raid should be the focus of any movie about Entebbe - it was an amazing military feat, due in part to a lot of luck, an example of the "who dares wins" motto of Sayeret Matkal (borrowed from the British SAS) and amazingly successful.

Here, the focus is on the terrorists and their supposed moral dilemmas, the hostages, and about 3 Israelis (Rabin, Peres and Lt Gen Gur). Way too much time is spent on unexplained tension between a dancer and her commando boyfriend, and interspersing scenes from her performance with the raid is pointless, irritating and distracting.

More time is spent on this dance routine than on the raid itself. Very little of the planning of the raid is shown, nothing is mentioned about how the Israelis gained vital intelligence (after Rabin emphasizes the lack of intel early in the planning), no mention is made of the roles of the other Israeli forces on the mission, etc.

Yes, there were some historical and military things the movie got right, but other than the flight engineer the hostages are largely a faceless mass. For crying out loud, they even got the original color of the Mercedes repainted by Sayeret Matkal wrong (it was white, not gold).

The movie takes liberties with the facts, such as showing Chief of Staff Motta Gur on the phone with Idi Amin with Rabin and Peres listening in. (Actually, the IDF officer who talked with Amin -- in an attempt to get him to release the hostages -- was former Israeli defense attache to Uganda Col Baruch Bar-Lev.

) Gur did not train Ugandan soldiers, that was Muki Betzer and other lower-ranking soldiers. Betzer, Netanyahu and the other commandos are barely in the movie because so much time is spent showing navel-gazing by the terrorists.

Col Ehud Barak and Brig Gen Dan Shomron are overweight officers who are barely involved, even though Shomron commanded the operation on the ground. With all its own historical and military inaccuracies, the 40-year-old "Raid on Entebbe" was a lot more satisfying movie.

This seems to be an attempt to highlight the plight of the Palestinians and to paint Rabin as a peacenik ahead of his time (he wasn't). One of the terrorists talks about his family in a refugee camp in Lebanon being killed by an Israeli tank - the Israeli army didn't invade Lebanon until 1979 (Operation Litani) and this event occurred in 1976.