Cert 15 Stars 3

Tense, brisk effective and brisk, this airplane action thriller is grounded in the best sense by great central performance Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

He stars as Tobias, an American co-pilot on a Berlin-Paris flight who’s caught in a life and death struggle to save the lives of his passengers and crew after terrorists try to seize control of the plane.

Having found fame as a teen star of TV series 3rd Rock From The Sun, Gordon-Levitt graduated to blockbusters such as Looper, Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises.

However this is far from an action man role but a portrait of an ordinary and mild-mannered man driven by extremes to desperate measures.

Tobias is confused and slow to respond to events and finds himself locked in the cockpit with an injured co-pilot and an unconscious terrorist, while his flight attendant girlfriend is at the mercy of the hijackers who threaten to murder their captives if Tobias doesn’t open the cockpit door.

Being a non-German speaker temporarily flummoxes the aggressors, and Tobias’s behaviour is desperate and painful as the balance of power switches back and forth.

Omid Memar is uncertain and scared as the youngest of the attackers, while Aylin Tezel is made to suffer as Tobias’s girlfriend.

It’s confidently directed by Patrick Vollrath in his feature-length film debut, who squeezes us into the claustrophobic cockpit and makes us question how would we act as Tobias does in the same circumstances.

He doesn’t keep us waiting for the drama to begin, maintains a strong tone and makes the close quarter violence shocking and realistically brief and nasty.

The sound design adds hugely to the fraught atmosphere, combining the warm hum of the instruments, heavy breathing of the injured co-pilot and the hammering of the terrorists on the cockpit door, while the calm voice of air traffic control contrasts with the onboard screams of panic and fraught shouted conversations. Book your seat now.