A recreation of a daring Israeli raid

7 Days in Entebbe isn't a bad movie, but it doesn't dig deep enough to be memorable.

In 1976, Israel launched Operation Thunderbolt, a daring raid in which a small group of IDF soldiers rescued 102 Israelis who had been passengers on an Air France plane that was hijacked by two Germans and two Palestinians.

7 Days in Entebbe, a movie about the hijacking and subsequent Israeli action, arrives nearly 42 years after an event that riveted world attention. Daniel Bruhl and Rosamund Pike headline the cast as German radicals who initially thought they were leading the charge but who quickly were surpassed by Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The Palestinians took charge once the plane arrived in Uganda, after a refueling stop in Benghazi, Libya. Once in Entebbe, hostages were housed in a decaying airport terminal that was no longer in use.

Movies such as 7 Days raise an obvious but unavoidable question. Why are we being asked to look at an event that since has been eclipsed by so many other events involving terrorist actions that put innocent civilians in harm's way? In part, the question can be answered with one sentence: Such events are inherently exciting and suspenseful.

But for a movie to succeed, it must get beyond that surface and dig deeper? As directed by Jose Padilha, 7 Days fails to function as more than a cinematic outline, offering quick looks into the motivation of the story's various players.

No stranger to tough, action-oriented movies, Padilha directed the Netflix series Narcos and made Bus 174, a documentary about hostages trapped on a bus in Rio. He also directed Elite Squad, a compelling Brazilian police drama. In 2014, Padilha tried his hand at a Hollywood reboot, a much-derided version of RoboCop .

7 Days emphasizes the importance of the moment at which the hijackers separated Jews from the non-Jews, evoking memories of Holocaust selections in the minds of the Jewish passengers and among the Israeli public.

The highest levels of the Israeli government also took note of the separate treatment of Jews as issues pertaining to saving the hostages were debated. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) and Defense Minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) took different sides.

Rabin knew he had to do something but wasn’t entirely sure that he should dismiss the possibility of negotiating with the Palestinians, something that went against Israeli policy forbidding talks with terrorists. Perez favored military action.

At one point, Uganda's Idi Amin (nicely played by Nonso Anozie) gets involved. He’s able to persuade the Palestinians to release the French hostages.

Padilha’s strangest decision involves the use of the Batsheva Dance Company which does a jarring musical version of Echad Mi Yodea (Who Knows One), a song usually sung at Passover seders. Staged by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, the dance -- seen in rehearsals and eventually in a performance -- proves compelling but because it opens the movie, it tends to upstage the rest of the story and it's never entirely clear why Padihla includes it.

To justify the dance sequence, the screenplay must introduce a superfluous tangent, a relationship between a dancer and one of the Israeli soldiers on the Entebbe raid.

Whatever Padihla was attempting to accomplish, he winds up looking a bit ridiculous when he alternates between a performance of the dance and the movie's climactic end-of-picture rescue.

There’s not much by way of character development among the crew and passengers, aside from a crew member (Denis Menochet) who tries to reason with Bruhl’s character, a publisher of radical books who already has his doubts about the role he’s chosen for himself as a German who may be called upon to kill Jews. The screenplay assigns Bruhl's character a role in saving the lives of the Jewish passengers.

Even Pike’s character, a Baader-Meinhof veteran and the more hardened of the two Germans, eventually admits she might have made a wrong choice.

Padilha knows how to give a realistic pulse to action, and the movie offers an important footnote at the end. Yonatan Netanyahu (Angel Bonanni), the only Israeli soldier to die in the raid, was the brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current prime minister.

Eventually, the movie tells us that if peace ever is to be achieved, Israel must swallow hard and negotiate. 7 Days in Entebbe does little to make that conclusion feel like more than a faint hope, an afterthought rather than a genuine expression of conviction.

'RoboCop' stomps into theaters

It's nothing special, but at least it avoids the junk heap.

Topical issues -- drones, the use of high-tech killing machines and the role of private enterprise in ensuring public safety -- waft through the 2014 remake of RoboCop, although they don't necessarily have much sticking power. Retooled for a new century, this remake of Paul Verhoeven's 1987 blockbuster also works in a reliable old standard: amoral corporate greed.

Not content with creating robots for heavy duty law enforcement in such dangerous places as Tehran, an evil corporation -- the unimaginatively named OmniCorp -- decides that the best route to conquering the U.S. domestic market is to put a man inside a machine.

The argument goes something like this: A human touch would help convince people that a sophisticated killing machine could experience pangs of conscience or -- in a worst case scenario -- be moved toward regret upon inflicting collateral damage.

Like the original, the screenplay contrives to make Detroit detective Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) the man in the machine. After assassins attempt to kill Murphy with a car bomb, his ragged remains are carted off to OmniCorp, where they are fitted into an imposing black suit of armor that's programmed to put him in uber-cop mode.

In one of the film's more inventive touches, we see that all that remains of Alex are his head, lungs, heart and one hand. So much for biology: The rest is metal.

Not surprisingly, Alex isn't happy to discover that he's been turned into a robot and that he henceforth will be deprived of fleshy contact with his wife (Abbie Cornish) and his young son (John Paul Ruttan).

As RoboCop, Murphy also has been deprived of the personality that he displays in the movie's early scenes, thanks in part to Kinnaman's ability to humanize cops, a skill he mastered in TV's The Killing. More about that later.

Brazilian director Jose Padilha, who created the pulsating Elite Squad movies, takes the reins, working with a screenplay that manages a bit of wit. Padilha makes amusing use of the Tin Man's refrain from The Wizard of Oz ("If I only had a heart") and of a throbbing rendition of "I Fought the Law."

But Padilha doesn't spend much time trying for tongue-in-cheek winks at the audience, aside from a recurring segment featuring Samuel L. Jackson as Pat Novak, host of a television show that pimps patriotism, OmniCorp-style.

A strong supporting cast adds some of the color that has been drained from Murphy's personality when he becomes RoboCop: Michael Keaton portrays Raymond Sellars, the villain who runs OmniCorp; Gary Oldman signs on as an OmniCorp scientist who hasn't entirely lost his moral bearings; Jackie Earle Haley has a nice turn as an OmniCorp enforcer, and Michael K. Williams appears as Murphy's human partner.

Not surprisingly, Padilha sometimes subordinates story to action, which he films in the typically chaotic style of today's movies. This means that aside from blasts and flying bullets, it's not always possible to tell what's actually happening.

If you've seen The Killing, you know that Kinnaman plays one of the more unusual cops ever to appear on TV, a hip Seattle detective with drug problems in his past. It would have been a stroke of real genius to allow Kennaman to retain a similar personality inside his black RoboCop suit.

To be fair, Kennaman does what he can to embody Robo's inner battle: Does Murphy retain enough of his humanity to counter the programming that guides his actions? Does anything of Alex Murphy remain or is he all RoboCop?

The screenplay tries build emotion by having RoboCop pine for his wife and son. Can he go from being a lethal weapon to a credible RoboDad.

RoboCop isn't as strapped for ideas as real-life Detroit is strapped for cash, but it can feel messy and noisy, which -- come to think about it -- may be just what folks are looking for with a remake that's willing to try lots of things, perhaps in hopes that some of them actually will work.

Amazingly, some do. RoboCop may lack the high-impact clobber of the original, but it manages to avoid the junk heap. I guess that's something.