Joseph Gordon-Levitt, after a four-year absence from starring roles in order to become a new daddy, returns with the pretty standard, sometimes tense airplane thriller, 7500.

Levitt does competent work as Tobias, a nebbish co-pilot on a night flight that includes his girlfriend (Aylin Tezel) on the crew. They aren't in the air long before a band of hijackers take hostages and demand entry into the cockpit, banging relentlessly on his door.

Director and co-writer Patrick Vollrath does very well with the film's first half. Actually, the film is quite good when the plane is in the air. Tobias communicates with the hijackers banging on his door via black and white video, and it's scary to watch. The film most certainly recalls the tense final moments of Paul Greengrass' United 93, when a similar, real-life situation occurred on 9/11.

Once the plane lands, Tobias ends up in the cockpit with one of the hijackers (Omid Memar), and this is where the movie sputters. The two actors give it their all, but the script calls for paint-by-numbers "hijacked plane on the tarmac" conversations, and this simply doesn't deliver on the promise of the film's first half.

Still, it's good to see Gordon-Levitt here. It's a demanding role for him, and he gets to shake the rust off in mostly fine fashion. Too bad the entirety of the movie doesn't match the quality of his performance.

7500 is streaming on Amazon Prime Video