There truly could not be a worse time in the UK to sit inside for seven hours in a row watching television than right now, and yet that is exactly what I did with Hijack, the new Apple TV+ series starring Idris Elba, earlier this week.
The seven part series, told in real time, centres around a plane that gets - you guessed it - hijacked while on course from Dubai to Heathrow by a group of mysterious, shouty British criminals with an unknown agenda. The hijacking unfolds over seven hours (the rough runtime of the series) while the passengers do everything in their powers to thwart their captors, and the authorities on the ground do all they can to help them out.
Amongst our motley crew of 200 passengers we have: the swashbuckling, confident hero type, played by the closest thing to John McClane this side of 2020 (aka Idris Elba); Line of Duty alum Rochenda Sandall’s grouchy mum of two who refuses to make her kids wear headphones; a morally dubious captain, portrayed by The Crown’s Ben Miles, and a group of canny English school girls who are first to alert the plane to the hijacking after they find a stray bullet in the toilet (yes, this really happens).
On the ground, there’s a humble British air traffic controller who’s always late to work (inimitable Torchwood alum Eve Myles), a cut-the-crap counter terrorism detective (The Good Wife’s Archie Panjabi) and a regular ol’ copper who just so happens to be shagging Idris Elba’s ex-wife (so far, so Luther), played by Homeland actor Max Beesley.
Altogether, it’s a pretty sturdy offering of British TV stalwarts, and each does their fair share of lifting to make what could have been a protracted, dull series or trashy Netflix-esque thriller into seven genuinely very, very watchable hours of television.
Elba is brilliantly magnetic as always, and the show wouldn’t be nearly as good if anyone else was in his shoes, but you do spend a lot of the time simply wishing he was playing sweary, bolshy DCI John Luther in some weird plane-themed spin-off, instead of this strange new guy called Sam Nelson. When people call him Sam you almost reel: “That’s not his name!”
The audience is also left hanging for most of the first episode while waiting to find out if this Sam Nelson is a police officer, or ex-military, or indeed from any background that would help to explain why he’s so willing to get involved in stopping a hijacking first hand, only for it to be very dramatically revealed in the last moments of episode one that he’s a… mergers and acquisitions negotiator.
This bit provokes a minor chortle but luckily Elba is such a convincing hero in the very way he moves and speaks that you wilfully forget how ridiculous it is and just let him do his thing. Idris Elba knows what he’s doing in any multiverse.
The rest of the cast is strong too, especially Myles and Panjabi, who are guaranteed to improve the quality of anything they’re in by at least 25 per cent (each). The only refinement that could be made is in the hijackers: though they are convincingly nasty, none of them are quite unhinged enough to feel like a live wire that could go off at any moment. They needed a sort of mad hatter character, ideally played by Stephen Graham, but alas, the hijackers plough on, hijacking as if it’s their day job.
That being said, I did sit through seven hours of this show in one near-complete sitting and there were moments where I shouted at the screen in anger, suspense and real, whole-hearted surprise. Basically, if you have a Sunday afternoon sometime soon with utterly no plans and a good quality house fan, close the blinds, make some popcorn and settle in for the ride.
