Told in real time, Hijack is a thriller that follows the journey of a hijacked plane as it makes its way to London over a seven hour flight. Each hour on the flight is one hour of TV. Idris Elba stars as Sam Nelson, an accomplished business negotiator (a fact we don't learn till quite late in the seriies), as he tries to outwit the hijackers and land the plane safely.
It's a premise that's very familiar, but what sets Hijack apart is the stellar performance by Idris Elba, who plays the confident machiavellian maneuver in one scene and a defeated captive in the next. Idris Elba has never struck me as particularly vulnerable in his potrayals on screen and even as the bad guy in Fast & Furious, he calls himself the black Superman.
So, after some clever tactics from Idris in the first episode I had thought that this was going to be another Idris vehicle that sees him overcoming the odds like a super hero, but instead, you see his confident persona get deconstructed as the plane flies closer to London and the stakes continue to rise.
Though you'd expect him to be a business negotiator who's also a former S.A.S and secret service agent, Sam Nelson is just a regular rich guy at the wrong place, at the wrong time and this is why his character is so compelling. He's allowed the room to simply speak and emote and I wish that he had more roles that allowed him to be on the back foot.
Without giving too much away, while you might think that Sam Nelson has the hijackers on the ropes, various twists and turns foil his plans and simultaneously amps up the suspense in each episode. Since it's a 7-hour movie split into 7 one hour episodes, each episodes follow the typical three act structure with a clear destination, twist, and resolution.
How we get to these conclusions each episode is the nail-biter and I binged it over one long Sunday.
Of course, it's not a one man show and the central mystery that revolves around the hijackers led by Neil Maskell's character, Stuart Atterton, was gripping from the start. Like any hijacking plot, the villians were terrifying and their sharp and brutal methods on board meant that there was always tension on screen. Neil Maskell's character goes on a similar journey to Elba's as the self-assured leader of the hijacking in the beginning before being overwhelmed himself by the end.
Special mention goes out to Eve Myles' performance as the steadfast air traffic controller Alice who is introduced as a perpetually tardy employee of the airport but shows her true colours as she doggedly pursues the clues that flight KA29 is in trouble. She's the Sgt. Al Powell to John McClane, the Luther Stickell to Ethan Hunt, the Chloe O'Brian to Jack Bauer.
It also helps that the 7-episode series was filmed authentically in an abandoned A330 which provided the film with a sense of claustrophobia and some nostalgia for us plebes who flly in economy. You know how the rows look super wide in regular movies? There's none of that here.
Director and executive producer Jim Field Smith, a self-proclaimed “aviation geek,” says that the appeal of setting the story on a plane was the "Claustrophobia of it, and I
immediately wanted to figure out how could we shoot the show as close to being in a real plane as possible. It's an experience that everyone's had, and so if you try and cheat it, or do it in a way that doesn't feel authentic, then people smell that straight away and the drama goes out of it.”
Even though the plane could be taken apart to make more room to shoot, the creators decided against taht to maintain the atmosphere, which shows. I can't imagine what the cast in the Economy seats felt like throughout the production while most of the action was confined to First Class with Idris Elba.
George Kay, the writer of Netflix's hit crime show Lupin, has written Hijack in almost the same vein with a leading character who outsmarts his opponents and weaves in a larger plot involving a criminal organisation, ex-lovers, and twists in each episode.
Hijack is a successful thriller that flies in the face of your expectations and delivers a non-stop thrill ride.
Now let's do 19 episodes with the 19 hour flight from Singapore to New York.