The confined space of airplanes, along with the assortment of strangers stuffed inside them and the looming potential for catastrophe, has always made them the ideal setting for a nail-biting thriller. The latest entry in the canon is Hijack, which follows a commercial flight traveling from Dubai to London that is, you guessed it, hijacked.
The journey is shown over the course of the series’s seven hour-long episodes, allowing us to witness how events play out in real time. Inside the plane, Sam Nelson (Idris Elba) and his fellow passengers concoct a series of schemes to try and outfox the terrorists, while, on the ground below, politicos and police race against the clock to figure out what to do about it.
Like many modern television shows, Hijack probably should have been a feature film, a format that’s a more natural fit for this brand of claustrophobic thriller. Even with sky-high stakes and a literal ticking clock, it’s much harder to maintain tension across seven individual episodes. The decision to play things out in real time ratchets up the anxiety by forcing viewers to live through each moment of the hijacking alongside the characters. But the effect is diluted by the way the story moves continually between the action inside the plane and the various storylines playing out on the ground, often muddying our sense of how much time has passed.
The plot is full of reveals and reversals as we learn who the bad guys are, what their plan is, and what other secrets may lie inside this plane. These kind of story beats require the series to feed the audience information in a very precise way, but Hijack’s timing isn’t as tightly engineered as it should be. Red herrings, like a character with a sinister past who may or may not be involved in the hijacking, are doled out and dispensed with far too quickly to have much of an impact.
While it can be a little ungainly in its execution, though, Hijack succeeds simply by being a volume shooter. Every episode provides a rapid procession of schemes and deceptions as the passengers try to outwit their captors, often finding ingenious ways to shuttle information back and forth between the plane’s cabins. Thanks to the wide cast of characters, it’s never entirely clear who’s going to be called into action next, or what role they might play.
For his part, Elba maintains an effortless air of authority that made him so formidable in The Wire and Luther, but he gets to play against that type to some degree here. Sam is a high-powered businessman, famous for his abilities as a negotiator, but he’s not an action hero. In fact, he spends much of Hijack desperately trying to prevent anything violent from occurring on the plane, even if that means playing nice with the terrorists. It’s a fascinating subversion of the typical power fantasy that actors like Elba are often tasked to embody.
Unfortunately, the drama playing out on the ground slows down the action, only occasionally offering anything compelling enough to justify cutting away from the pressure cooker in the sky. And a subplot concerning Sam’s son (Jude Cudjoe) and the boy’s stepdad (Max Beesley), a white cop, feels particularly flimsy. But while Hijack isn’t always a smooth ride, its twists and thrills are enough to keep you strapped in.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
Strange that a thriller set in 2023 should use as its premise an act which very rarely happens any more. Perhaps we’ll see an Apple TV thriller series about modern day sheep rustling, coin-clipping or, er, “blocking the right of way of a passenger pigeon”.