Hijack Review: High Intrigue Junk Food

There are plenty of movies that depict hijackings, but there are far fewer TV portrayals. It's understandable — after all, who wants to spend hours on a hijacked TV plane for entertainment? "Hijack," the latest series from Apple TV+, tries to overcome this hurdle with the real-time tale of a hijacking that includes flourishes of excitement throughout its seven episodes. But excitement doesn't translate to positive impressions, and although "Hijack" is compulsively watchable, it's also implausible and silly.

The show starts with Idris Elba's Sam Nelson being the last person to board a flight in Dubai. He seems to be having some trouble deciding whether he should get on at all, but he ultimately does, and the plane takes off for London. Early in the flight a girl finds a bullet on the bathroom floor. She shows this to the kind man who helped her stow her luggage, and he takes it to show to a flight attendant — or so he says. Really, though, he's brought it to the leader of his hijacking ring, and the bullet convinces the leader that the group should move up their time table. That's why the hijackers take over the plane around half an hour into a six-and-a-half-hour flight.

What follows from there is the drama that unfolds among the passengers, the flight crew, and the hijackers, along with attempts on the ground to figure out what's going on with the flight across numerous countries. Most of the action in the air is driven by Elba's character, not because he's a particularly motivated hero or villain, but because he's the loudest guy in the room. While Elba is the star of the show and understandably has the most to do, this still defies logic. They explain this away by saying that his job is to help corporations get what they want in negotiations, but that doesn't mean he'll make the right choices during a hijacking. Nonetheless, not only is Elba's Sam the loudest, he's also presented as the man who makes the best decisions. This is strange given that, from the beginning of the show to the end, his choices are so unreliable that he's almost as hard to trust as the hijackers.

Then there are the people on the ground. Sam's ex-wife (Christine Adams) — who he can't get over — and son (Jude Cudjoe) get an odd text message from him, propelling her new police-detective boyfriend (Max Beesley) into helping by contacting his ex-girlfriend (Archie Panjabi), a counterterrorism agent, who brings the case to the wider counterterrorism community. There's also the flight control team working with other countries as the situation goes from bad to worse. Throughout the show there are people who come and go on the ground, but this is the plane's story and it all comes back to it, the hijackers, and Elba.

From the beginning of the hijacking, things never stop going wrong for everyone. The pilot (Ben Miles), wanting to protect his lover (Kate Phillips), opens the cockpit door, overpowering his first mate (Kaisa Hammarlund). Two men, against Sam's advice, attack one of the hijackers (Mohamed Elsandel) and quickly get tied up. And Sam tries to play both ends against the middle and play nice with the hijackers while talking to the pilot via a video game. But the biggest problem with all of this is that the same things happen repeatedly. People get shot and die, military planes are scrambled with the aim of shooting the plane out of the sky, and the cockpit is repeatedly called by the various agencies on the ground between Dubai and London.

It's compelling to watch because you want to know what happens next; who was murdered when the bullets started flying? Will the hijacker (Jack McMullen) who got stabbed die? Will the fighter jets shoot the plane down? But it's all empty calories, and you'll barely remember what happened once you've finished the series. The fact is, you know the plane makes it to the end because the series is exactly seven episodes, the approximate length of the flight, so it's purely a matter of what happens before it lands. And although things occur that no one would want to experience in real life, no one changes even a little bit. The awful mother (Rochenda Sandall) is still awful, the vengeful hijacker (Neil Maskell) is still vengeful, and Sam is still confident in his abilities to negotiate no matter what.

The biggest problem with "Hijack" is that there are several plot lines lost in the mix. There are the people on the ground who the hijackers work for, the stabbed hijacker who's bleeding out, and the flight attendant (Jeremy Ang Jones) who's been shot, and none of them get a lot of follow through. The thing that we're supposed to care about is what happens to Idris Elba. Everything else is secondary. 

As a result, the story is unbalanced, but that almost doesn't matter. Elba is such a huge presence on screen that it's easy to forget or not pay too much attention to a lot of the other things going on around him. Sure ,you recognize Archie Punjabi as the counterterrorism agent or Christine Adams from "Black Lightning" as Marsha, Sam's ex, but none of these figures have any weight. The cast is large but Sam and the hijackers are the only ones who really matter — everyone else is more or less interchangeable. While Sam may remember their names, it'll be a miracle if you do.

In the end, "Hijack" is deadly serious but light on specifics that aren't immediately important to the story. The show is junk food. It's enjoyable going down, but you have to acknowledge that you could have spent the time in a more productive way, even if it's just watching a higher quality program. It's unclear why Elba decided that he not only wanted to be in this but serve as an executive producer. Still, if you're looking for something with high intrigue and not much else, this is it.

The first two episodes of "Hijack" premiere Wednesday, June 28 on Apple TV+, with additional episodes premiering one at a time on subsequent Wednesdays.