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Blood Red Sky Review: Netflix's airplane hijacking thriller will hijack your brain

What could've been a great delusion that somebody Frankensteined together from two fiercely different movies rather turns into a low-flying trudge that neglects to sew its befuddled parts into a beast with its very own character,

2.5/5
Blood Red Sky Review: Netflix's airplane hijacking thriller will hijack your brain

Blood Red Sky

Peter Thorwarth's Blood Red Sky is a partly engaging ride that — at the perfect time — is hijacked itself, as the terrorists realize that they're in an altogether different film than the one for which they had signed up for. The film doesn't discover the perfect moment; this half-cooked, overlong piece of class obscuring German schlock doesn’t bother to look out for it. What could've been a great delusion that somebody Frankensteined together from two fiercely different movies rather turns into a low-flying trudge that neglects to sew its befuddled parts into a beast with its very own character.

Blood Red Sky is in a crisis mode from the moment it begins; we realize that something goes wrong on an airplane which is on the way from Germany to New York, and the film starts with a not-so-trained pilot landing the plane at an RAF air base in Scotland (where some men are ready with their rifles aimed on the cockpit). A young man named Elias (Carl Anton Koch) comes out of the cabin with a teddy bear under his arm, and the film goes into flashback mode to show us what happened to the passengers.

Meanwhile, we learn that Elias' single parent Nadja had something to do with it. Played by Peri Baumeister, whose sharp presentation makes up for the content's missing nibble, Nadja enters the film donning a dark hairpiece that makes her a carbon copy for Noomi Rapace, and the power etched onto her face is that of a lady preparing themselves for an outing on board the Prometheus as opposed to an overnight flight to JFK.

Elias tells a stranger at the door that his mom is travelling to the U.S. for a bone marrow therapy, however the term "malignant growth", is strangely never mentioned. The fluid medicine mixed drink that Nadja jabs herself with at the air terminal bathroom suggests that her condition isn't so cut-and-dry. When the hijackers take control of the plane at some place over the Atlantic, we realize that Nadja isn't the one who picked the wrong flight.

Usually, the plot of a film like this would wait until the beginning of the third act (or possibly the midpoint) to spring its snare, but Blood Red Sky doesn't seem to be providing a surprising element to the viewers. Rearranging watcher assumptions — even those who've had the surprise ruined for them by the film's trailer as it auto-plays on their Netflix home screen — Thorwarth and writer Stefan Holtz are less worried about how Nadja confounds the hijacking than they are with how the hijacking affects Nadja's relationship with Elias.

What do the hijackers need? Something appears to be off-putting about the jihadist message they force a Muslim passenger to read at gunpoint. Why doesn't Nadja die when the most combative of the terrorists shoots her in the chest? Blood Red Sky is going to respond to that puzzle in the most boring way possible.

Instead of taking us through the details of Nadja's infection, Blood Red Sky stops the action before it even begins to portray the protagonist's history. At a crucial point of the film, Thorwarth drops us into a flashback (inside a flashback) that drains the air out of the story with all the power of a messed up window in a compressed lodge. Why share in the shock that falls over the hijackers when Nadja begins drinking from their jugular veins like water fountains when we can find out about the night she was transformed into a bloodsucker in detail?

Nadja is traveling to America to undergo a treatment, but what is the point in successfully getting treated when her lone child will realize the evil side to her which she ignored to hide? It's an interesting predicament — one that a better film would have done more to differentiate against the hijackers' fearful cruelty — yet Blood Red Sky falls short in converting that conflict into action.

Blood Red Sky has started streaming on Netflix, beginning on Friday, July 23.

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