Hijack: Is Idris Elba's plane thriller worth a watch?
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Much like Gerard Butler's economically titled film Plane before it, Hijack is a TV show about a hijacking.
And if you were one of the unlucky passengers on its direct hop from Dubai to London, it would probably take little more than the time before the seatbelt sign is switched off to decide that Idris Elba's hero Sam Nelson is not your average bloke.
For the first few scenes, Hijack presents the tantalising possibility that Nelson could be the piece's villain, seeing Elba return to the crooked pedigree of his (arguably best) role as drug kingpin Stringer Bell in The Wire.
For one thing, Nelson has nothing on his person for this seven-hour flight except for a gift bag with a pricey bracelet meant to win his ex-wife back.
Carrying only the clothes on his back and the pressie he probably just bought duty-free, Nelson strolls up to the gate of his Kingdom Airlines flight with seconds to spare. With little more than a nonchalant smile, he convinces a stewardess to let an understandably harried passenger behind him onto the flight.
Once on the plane, having turned left at the door to get to his first-class seat, Nelson suspiciously surveys the passengers around him (partly because he hasn't got a single other thing to do).
But despite all this dubious behaviour, Hijack isn't The Wire, and Elba is no villain.
Instead, the show's seven episodes chart his real-time attempts to take down head hijacker Stuart Atterton (Neil Maskell) and his group of gun-toting bandits, who are chewing up so much scenery it's a miracle the flight makes it to London (or does it?).
Once Nelson miraculously figures out the hijack is about to happen, explained away with some in-flight washbag intrigue, he elects himself hostage rep and tries to strike a deal with said hijackers.
The drama down the plane aisles is balanced with an on-the-ground response from the authorities, including canny air traffic controller Alice Sinclair (Torchwood's Eve Myles) and straight-nosed copper Daniel Farrell (Homeland's Max Beesley).
Conveniently, Farrell has some romantic history with a counter-terrorism detective (The Good Wife's Archie Panjabi) but is now sleeping with Nelson's ex-wife (Christine Adams) and soon-to-be new bracelet owner... if the plane gets there.
The interwoven response in London with the airborne hostage situation answers some of the questions about ruthlessly pragmatic Nelson — like, how is he equipped with the skills to take on the baddies and maybe even land the plane himself if needed?
We're told his job is "difficult to explain". International super spy? Detective extraordinaire? Stunt man with a murky past as a contract killer? No, he gets hauled in by "big companies".
"If there's a merger or a takeover, they bring Sam in because when it all kicks off, Sam's the best at handling it," his ex-wife explains. Handling what? "The negotiation."
So, our hero is, essentially, a consultant who flies first class.
The Apple TV+ show is built around the central force of Nelson and his boundless ability to, say, crawl down an aisle past the hijackers or message the ousted captain (The Crown's Ben Miles) via a game on his seat-back TV. While his characterisation is minimal at best, that of the remaining flight cohort is tropey at worst.
Most of the hackneyed writing is intriguingly left to the passengers at the back in steerage. Hijacking aside, these people have nothing to look forward to but whatever beige matter Kingdom Airlines eventually plates up.
This reaches a low point with economy class's Northern mum of two (Line of Duty's Rochenda Sandall), who enters an overhead storage bin turf war with an Aussie wellness adopter across the aisle.
While plenty of familiar ingredients and cliché dollops are in the mix here, it's hard not to be slightly charmed by the silliness of the whole thing.
The sturdy cast of British stalwarts lends heft to the benign farce, where whole episodes are spent figuring out things like whether the hijackers have live ammunition or if the stewardesses can still serve that lunch that's probably started to go off.
The show goes to great lengths to ensure its characters learn piecemeal details alongside the audience, maintaining momentum as we cruise from one country's air space to another. As a result of that and Elba's raw charisma on screen, Hijack is highly watchable.
Although the seven episodes are being released weekly, the cranked-up suspense and lingering question of what these hijackers actually want would probably be enough to strap in for the Dubai to London leg all in one go — if only Apple had given us the option.
The first two episodes of Hijack are available to stream on Apple TV+, with subsequent episodes released weekly.
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