It was one of the most audacious undertakings of the age: the Israeli mission to Uganda to rescue the passengers of a hijacked Air France plane in July 1976. And Brazilian director José Padilha should have been just the audacious director to tell the story: recently at the helm of the Netflix series Narcos, he made his name with Rio hostage documentary Bus 174 and galvanised the Berlin film festival with his thunderous 2008 Golden Bear winner, the favela police drama Elite Squad. But he’s unlikely to set the Berlinale competition on fire with this ponderous, sometimes ludicrous, number that goes through all the docudrama motions to pretty flat effect.

Apart from Padilha, 7 Days in Entebbe has promising credentials: a strong cast headed by Daniel Brühl and Rosamund Pike as the German radicals who prove out of their depth running the hijack mission with two Palestinians, and a script by Black Watch playwright Gregory Burke, who also scored a notable Berlin hit in 2014 as writer of the super-tense Northern Ireland drama ’71.

So why does Entebbe barely lift off the runway? Partly because much of the action, while aiming for the clock-ticking reconstruction feel you associate with Paul Greengrass, feels so sluggish. The buildup to the seventh day of the hijack never musters any genuine suspense. Much of the action involves the hijackers debating ideology, and the Israeli politicians outlining developments to each other (“Shimon, let me explain to you the situation as it stands…”), making for a sluggishly theatrical feel. The dialogue is in English, with characters occasionally dropping into their own languages – French, German or Arabic – seemingly at random. And some of the dialogue creaks appallingly: “I want to throw bombs into the consciousness of the masses,” says Brühl as hijacker Wilfried Böse. Among the actors, however, Brühl fares best, doing his familiar angst-ridden eternal-student routine with ease and confidence.

You might have expected the hostage situation on board the plane, and later at Entebbe airport, to carry nail-biting tension, but Padilha’s approach is oddly leisurely. At any rate, he’s less interested in evoking events from the hostages’ point of view than in demonstrating what was done by both captors and rescuers, in a rather detached procedural manner. That means a lot of backstage discussion among the hijackers and the Israeli parliament – headed by a rather good Lior Ashkenazi as a careworn prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Eddie Marsan as the defence minister, Shimon Peres, so distractingly slathered with special effects makeup that he looks more like Eddie Marzipan. Meanwhile, Nonso Anozie plays Idi Amin – and all credit to the film for resisting the cartoonishness that usually defines screen portrayals of the dictator.

The film’s weirdest decision, motivated by the fact that one soldier in the Israeli task force has a dancer girlfriend, is to run a vaguely Pina Bausch-y modern dance routine throughout. It features men and women in black suits thrashing about to a piece of drumming and chanting that’s no doubt supposed to carry metaphoric force and give the soundtrack an Ennio Morricone urgency, but that comes across more like a Hasidic tribute to Stomp!.

“Surprise and speed is the key,” someone comments at one point; the only surprise is how unspeedy and unsurprising this project turned out to be.