With Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jamie Foxx in lead roles, how could anything go wrong in this action, sci-fi thriller written by first-time screenwriter ​Mattson Tomlin and directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost?  In a word – plenty.

It’s 3:00 am in New Orleans, nicely captured by cinematographer Michael Simmonds. The drug dealers are hard at work selling a shiny new pill which, when taken, endows the recipient with super powers. At $500 a pop, this magic bullet is not stable and while it could gift you with superhuman strength allowing you to lift a car up over your head, or turn you into a super hero where bullets bounce off your cheeks, or render you invisible, or enable you to sprint at almost 50 miles per hour, the pill is unstable and, as Colson Baker, a.k.a. ​Rapper Machine Gun Kelly, demonstrates, after taking the pill he turns into a flaming torch.  I guess you could say you pays the price and you takes your chances.

Frank, a LAPD officer played by Gordon-Levitt, arrives on the scene and busts a young girl named Robin, who is a drug pusher/wannabe Rapper, played by Dominique Fishback.  They then become partners in the pursuit of the major supplier.  Every once in a while throughout the film, she breaks out in a Rap riff germane to a particular situation and becomes a pivotal character in the ensuing silly action.  In order to level the playing field with the bad guys, Frank takes a pill and taps into his hidden strength.  Yes, there are shades of Bradley Cooper’s starring role in the well-done Limitless, which also involved taking a pill – giving new meaning to “on the pill.” Sorry.  Couldn’t resist that. There are also vague, superficial similarities to Marvel and DC Comics super heroes.

Enter now Jamie Foxx as Art, a former army major whose daughter has been kidnapped by the sinister, cartoonish bad guys played by  Rodrigo Santoro and Amy Landecker, leaders in Teleios, the outfit peddling Power. Their creepy plan is to mass produce the Power Pill and create an indestructible militia that could take over the world.  It seems that Art’s daughter Tracy, played by Kyanna Simone Simpson, has special antibodies in her blood that allows her to achieve the same effects of the Power pill without actually taking it.  She is currently being held captive on a cavernous cargo ship turned into a massive floating laboratory with endless winding corridors and secret hatches controlled by a highly intricate set of computers, let’s say on the scale of NASA or the CIA.  Art is determined to rescue his daughter and in a flashback remembers the two of them in a car when his daughter is dragged away by the bad guys thus beginning his unrelenting determination to rescue her.  So, the three of them – Frank, Art, and Robin make their way to the ship and lo and behold, she figures out how to work the unbelievably intricate computer system controlling the doors and hatches, giving Frank and Art blow-by-blow instructions on how to retrieve Tracy without getting caught.

Having rescued her, now the four of them have to get off the ship alive and thus, popping a pill, Art becomes a version of the Hulk and a big punch-out ensues.   And, like any good fairytale, the good guys win, the bad guys are dead, and Robin, the former drug dealer, gets to cut her first rap single.  Other members of the supporting cast include, Allen Maldonado, Casey Neistat, Tait Fletcher, Colson Baker, Michael Thomas, Andrene Ward-Hammond, Yoshi Sudarso, and a cameo guest performance by Courtney B. Vance, who delivers one of the most believable moments in the film.

While it might sound good on paper, the film is weighted down by predictable clichés, and rather absurd plot points.  It’s a wonder that despite the poor script, and intermittent unfocused direction, that the three principal characters gave creditable performances – especially Fox and Fishback.  Gordon-Levitt, who is usually solid in creating characters, did have a bit of a challenge in maintaining consistency throughout the R Rated, 1 hour and 51 minutes of an action film that ultimately falls flat.

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Any time Joseph Gordon-Levitt appears in a film, or a television series, he is what is known as a “bankable star.” This meant he would deliver a haunting, highly textured performance, which would be reflected at the box office. (Remember those days?) Among some of his films are 500 Days of Summer, Hesher, Inception, 50-50, Looper, Don Jon, and Snowden, after which he took some time off to be with his young family.  His latest film 7500*, is a story about the hijacking of European Flight 162 en route from Berlin to Paris.  Now you might ask yourself what sets 7500 apart from at least ten other films with a similar theme, some of which include the most memorable United 93 and Air Force One.  The answer might be a slightly different twist in the somewhat flawed script co-written by Senad Halibasic and Patrick Vollrath, who also directed.

With a time code scrolling across the bottom of the screen, indicating Gate D-29, the film starts out pretty much like an ordinary day at the airport with lots of people going through security and hurrying to their respective gates.  The boarding is routine with the passengers warmly greeted by the flight attendants who help them find their seats and get ready to begin serving.  Meanwhile, inside the cockpit, German Captain Michael Lutzmann, well played by former pilot Carlo Kitzlinger, and his American co-pilot, 10-year veteran Tobias Ellis, immaculately played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, are immersed in routine pre-flight checks, the complex symbols and numbers of which are displayed in a continuous scrawl. The instrument panel is brightly lit and almost takes on a life of its own.

One of the flight attendants is Gökçe (Aylin Tezel) who gains entry into the cockpit to see what the captain and co-pilot would like for lunch.   As it turns out, she is Tobias’ live-in German-Turkish girlfriend and they have a two-year-old son named Deniz, and are in the middle of planning their wedding.  She is also concerned that they missed the enrollment date for their son, but Tobias, in his very cool, relaxed, soft-spoken demeanor, tells her that it’s not a disaster.  With the pre-check completed, the flight is now ready for take off.  However, two passengers, whose luggage is onboard, are not on the plane and because of that, their luggage has to be removed with a potential delay. We then see two people running towards the plane and the removal is halted.  So far, so good, right?  The control tower gives them the go-ahead, with a warning that they may run into some turbulence, and off they go.  There is a pilot security camera in the cockpit that shows the activity taking place in the cabin.

Suddenly, and from out of nowhere, three Islamic extremists try to breach the cockpit, with only the leader, Kenan (Muruthan Muslu), making it inside where he delivers a lethal blow to the captain, as well as stabbing Tobias, who is bleeding profusely.  Despite that, he is able to knock out Kenan and restrain him.  The other two terrorists, a very young and confused Vedat (Omid Memar) and the unrelenting Kalkan (Passar Hariky), continuously pound on the cockpit door demanding that they be let in, and I mean continuously pounding. As you might guess, they threaten to kill hostages with their homemade shivs crafted from glass chards.  To save lives, Tobias wants to open the cockpit door, but the tower forbids him to do so.  Air traffic control diverts the plane from its original destination to a stopover in Hanover, about twenty minutes away, for “refueling.”

The desperate 18-year-old Vidat, deciding he really doesn’t want to die, is finally allowed into the cockpit where he and Tobias find a common purpose and agree that one extraordinary action should not go forward.  On landing in Hanover, the passengers, who have restrained the third terrorist, are allowed to disembark as we hear the disembodied voice of a negotiator, the results of which you’ll have to find out for yourself.

Getting back to the different twist on a familiar theme, one factor is cinematographer Sebastian Thaler’s capture of the claustrophobic, almost surreal, circumstances taking place in that cockpit where the action is centered virtually  throughout the entire film.  The occasional shaky focus endows the instrument panel with a profusion of dancing colors and shapes with the same technique in shooting the runway and airport lights.   The other major factor is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s riveting tour-de-force performance which, despite script weaknesses, takes his character on an emotional roller coaster ride through myriad actions and reactions, but as the character, always comes back to “center,” to do the job for which he was trained.

*7500 is an emergency transponder code for a hijacking.

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