Idris Elba plays a business-class hero in airborne thriller Hijack — review

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As a consultant specialising in corporate acquisitions, Sam Nelson has had to oversee a number of tense takeovers in his time. So when his flight from Dubai to London is seized by a group of gun-wielding mercenaries, it’s really just another day in the office.

In Hijack, a new airborne thriller series on Apple TV+, Idris Elba plays the business-class hero who tries to use his negotiating savvy to de-escalate the threat both to those on board and those obliviously going about their day thousands of feet below. Told in real time over seven episodes, it is an adequately entertaining, if insistently humourless, actioner — exactly the kind of mindless fare that would make for perfect viewing on a long-haul flight, were it not a chronicle of every anxious passenger’s worst fears.

The show begins with a survey of more mundane plane-related horrors: obstreperous children, voluble seatmates, squabbles over luggage space. But simmering tension turns to terror when, shortly after take-off, five British passengers announce they’re taking control of the aircraft. With his staff — including his hostess mistress — threatened at gunpoint, the pilot cedes the cockpit.

Amid the turbulence, Sam, stolid and serious, urges the rash-minded around him to check their combative impulses. His aim is to gauge the hijackers’ uncertain motivations and gain their trust. In the meantime, a text surreptitiously sent to his ex-wife (Christine Adams) reaches authorities on the ground in London, whose response we follow.

While little about it could be described as first-class, Hijack is at its limited best when it focuses on the claustrophobic cauldron of a panic-stricken cabin, where Sam and some other brave souls find imaginative ways to pass messages along the aisles and to control towers en route.

When it leaves that pressurised environment the story becomes overstretched and cluttered with subplots, procedural scenarios and disposable characters. In this instance, a little more economy would be no bad thing.

★★★☆☆

Episodes 1 and 2 available on Apple TV+ from June 28; new episodes released weekly