HIJACK Review: Here We Go Again

"Oh my gawd!"

Hijack
The first two episodes are now streaming globally on Apple TV+. I've seen all seven episodes of the limited series.

To be fair, Sandy Dennis is the one who said "Oh my gawd!" over and over again in Neil Simon's The Out of Towners. Directed by Arthur Hiller, the comedy concluded with the titular couple finally returning home on a jet plane, only to be hijacked to Cuba, prompting that final cry of anguish.

In 1970, that was a joke. As a boy who had only taken one flight on an airplane, I thought the last line in The Out of Towners was funny. The same year, I was sad when Van Heflin blew up a bomb on a flight in Airport, which made me afraid to fly. Even so, I was a boy! Two years later, I was thrilled by the idea that Charlton Heston was forced by a Vietnam vet to fly his airplane to Russia in Skyjacked. And on and on through a multitude of Airport sequels and rip-offs.

Even in my youth, I should have recognized that any such incident is a nightmare, not a joke. In the succeeding decades, filmmakers have vamped on the same, irresistible theme; most people can relate to the fear of flying, compounded by the fear that one or more terrorists might be on board. Most such movies or series have treated the subject with serious intent, but everyone wants to create their own variation, it seems.

Longtime collaborators George Kay and Jim Field Smith created Hijack and structure it as seven episodes that approximate real-time during a seven-hour flight from Abu Dhabi to London. George Kay wrote and Jim Field Smith directed the first two episodes, which introduce a host of characters and establish Idris Elba as the lead, Sam Nelson, a business negotiator.

Sam is obviously successful, since he flies in first class, but he's presented as a loving father who just wants to get back home to his family. Note: his ex-wife is living with her boyfriend, who just happens to be a police officer, who just happens to be called in on the hijacking case for his expertise.

That sort of manufactured coincidence piles up quickly in the assemblage of characters, quickly establishing the series as a reckless potboiler that throws away logic in favor of narrative twists. Strictly as entertainment, it's recklessly silly, and could have been handled more tidily in 90 minutes or so, like Idris Elba's recent star turn in Baltasar Kormákur's superior Beast (2022), which knew it was pulp and was all the better for it.

The advantage of a series such as this is that we have more time to enjoy Idris Elba. He remains the principal reason to watch the show, in order to luxuriate in his command of the screen, and to appreciate his ability to generate empathy for a character whose actions are not always easily comprehensible. It's Idris Elba! 'Nuff said.

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