Critic Reviews

7500 takes a familiar scenario and doubles down on its claustrophobic potential to make it fresh.

In an era marked by omnipresent terror and universal doom, 7500 sparks fear and soothes anxiety in the same breath. Although the film utilizes violence as its foundation, 7500 promotes the idea that heroes exist everywhere, proving that, even amid turbulent opposition, survival, and endurance are sometimes the bravest acts people can ever accomplish.

The cast, especially Gordon-Levitt and Memar as Vedat, the youngest of the hijackers, excel at combining drama and physicality. Rather than the over-choreographed fight scenes of most Hollywood movies, the violence here is clumsy, painful and visceral.

It’s a potentially mid-’90s B-movie premise, but director Patrick Vollrath and star Joseph Gordon-Levitt keep it taut, tense and classy. Just a shame it doesn’t stick the landing.

This is one well-made thriller, and for a director who wants to work in that genre, this is as strong a first feature as any filmmaker could hope for.

7500 is, at heart, a chamber piece. The setting, the number of characters and the setup are all constrained in an elegant yet dramatically effective way that belies the film’s low budget. There’s a taut, piano wire-like quality to its simplicity: None of the drama comes from action-movie cliches, but rather from the actors, along with the disembodied voices of an air traffic controller, a police officer and others.

Vollrath uses the tight space he had to film in to great, suspenseful advantage. It’s a film of extreme close-ups, low instrument-panel lighting, of checklists, procedures, first aid and in-your-face violence. There are no glib taunts, threats or macho one-liners.

You wouldn’t exactly call it fun or enjoyable, but it’s a thriller that does what it sets out to do, which is to make you uncomfortable and then wring you dry. And if you’re feeling cooped up being stuck at home, well, the proceedings here could make the smallest apartment feel spacious.

Compact, edge-of-the-seat storytelling that makes good use of Joseph Gordon Levitt’s decent, appealing everyman persona, 7500 may have its flaws but it still marks an impressive feature debut for Vollrath.

Gordon-Levitt, absent from the big screen since 2016′s "Snowden," oscillates nicely between maintaining an air of remarkable calm and then breaking down completely, and he pretends to know what all those airplane buttons do quite well.