Clint Eastwood puts us in the pilot’s seat in a high-altitude version of Miracle on the Hudson

REVIEW: Tom Hanks takes over the controls in the incredible true story of a pilot who beat the odds.

SULLY

Three stars

Director Clint Eastwood

Starring Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney

Rating M

Running time 96 minutes

Verdict Mission impossible — for real

Three and a half minutes. That’s how long Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger had to safely land his Airbus 320 after a flock of geese disabled both its engines on the initial climb out of LaGuardia airport.

That’s not even enough time to boil a soft boil an egg.

Losing altitude, swiftly, over one of the most densely populated cities in the world, Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) made a split-second decision to ditch his plane in the Hudson River.

The photos of that incredible mid-winter landing, in which all 155 passengers and crew survived, huddling together on the wings of the plane or in inflatable life rafts, ricocheted across the globe.

Headline writers described it as the Miracle on the Hudson. Sullenberger was embraced as a national hero.

Seven years on, director Clint Eastwood examines those events and their immediate aftermath in forensic detail. The result is strangely compelling.

He gives plenty of screen time to the National Transportation Safety Board review in which Sullenberger is grilled, repeatedly, over what happened.

Tom Hanks in a scene from the film Sully directed by Clint Eastwood.

When early reports suggest that a tarmac landing could, in fact, have been successfully executed, investigators begin to question the veteran pilot’s judgement, and whether he’s a miracle worker, as claimed, or just a dangerous show-off.

This robust line of inquiry coincides with Sullenberger’s own post-traumatic stress symptoms, which lead him to also doubt himself.

If he’s going to survive the Safety Board hearing in once piece, Sullenberger pilot will need to navigate his way around the investigators’ blind spots and prejudices with almost as much skill as he flew the plane on that fateful day.

Even from the ground, the true story of US Airways Flight 1549 from New York to Charlotte, North Carolina, on January 15, 2009, is hard to credit.

By putting his audience in the pilot’s seat, Eastwood shows us just how extraordinary Sullenberger’s feat really was.

Tom Hanks is as solid as ever in the role of Sullenberger, a stoic who is trying to hold it together under immense pressure — from without and within.

But he plays the part with such furrow-browned earnestness, the character, while earning our respect, is a little hard to warm to.

The two-time Oscar-winner is upstaged, in the closing credits, by footage of the real Sullenberger who exhibits the twinkle that’s lacking from Hank’s portrayal.

Sully opens next Thursday (September 8).