Hijack movie rating and review

Hijack (2008) movie posters :

Hijack (2008) Movie Rating and Review :

Rating :

Acting – 5/10
Direction – 3.5/10
Screenplay – 3.5/10
Music – 3.5/10
Technique – 4/10

Review :

Plane vanilla

For a film named Chamku (which we were forced to review last week), one didn’t know what to expect. It could be a racy thriller, an emotional drama, perhaps even a breezy comedy. But for a film named Hijack, you can keep your eyes and ears shut and still accurately predict what the two hours and 20 minutes are going to throw up. You know there will be a plane. You know there will be terrorists. You know there will be a hijack. And you know there will be one man who will single-handedly ground the hijackers.

What else can a thriller about a plane hijack offer, you may ask? If Bruce Willis’s Die Hard 2 and the Kurt Russell-Halle Berry starrer Executive Decision had taken the tried-and-tested formula and still managed to keep the seat belts of the viewers fastened, there is zero effort on Hijack’s part to arrest attention. No twists in the plot, no unexpected moments, no real thrills. And by the time an attempt at a twist comes close to the end, one simply couldn’t care less.

Shiney Ahuja plays pilot-turned-maintenance engineer (!) Vikram Madaan for whom hijacks are a way of life. Having lost his wife (debutante Kaveri Jha) to one, Madaan now finds himself in action replay mode when a plane carrying his young daughter is hijacked by a group of terrorists. From then on, it’s Kandahar-meets-Die Hard 2. The desperate dad sneaks into the plane, takes on the terrorists (with more than a little help from airhostess Esha Deol) and brings back the plane to safety. Yawn.

Hijack throws up so many cliches that you can spot the next one a mile away. An ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances. Terrorist vocab that doesn’t go beyond ‘jehad’ and ‘qaum’. And the ‘revelation’ that the man in charge of obliterating the terrorists is actually in cahoots with them.

The characters are tarred by the same predictable brush. The newly-wed woman whose husband is brutally killed, a helpless home minister (who even talks like Jaswant Singh!) and a terrorist leader who snarls and laughs devilishly but does little else.

The role is hardly a challenge for Shiney Ahuja and the actor does well, especially in the action scenes. The unkempt look, though, is an eyesore. Esha Deol is, well, Esha Deol. And one fails to understand why a plane-load of passengers caught in a life-and-death situation just doesn’t look frightened enough.

Director Kunal Shivdasani deserves a pat for attempting something else than a love story in his debut film, but that’s about all one can grant him. The music by Justin-Uday is mediocre save for the breezy ‘Aksar’ track.

The only thing about Hijack that isn’t predictable? The absence of a romantic track between Shiney and Esha, with Shiney’s daughter even addressing Esha as ‘didi’.

Hatke? You bet.

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