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'Hijack' -Painfully Predictable

By Nikhil Kumar
Film critic, ApunKaChoice.Com

After just half-an-hour into ‘Hijack’ you know exactly where this movie is going to crash-land.

Those who have seen and presumably enjoyed the Hollywood hijack thrillers like ‘Executive Decision’, ‘Air Force One’, ‘Die Hard 2’, and others of the ilk, would find ‘Hijack’ as painfully predictable as the horoscopes in cheap tabloids.

In

‘Hijack’, debutant director Kunal Shivdasani shows no frugality in unabashedly borrowing from the aforesaid thrillers and the famous Indian Airlines hijack a few years ago that unfortunately had an end that no Indian filmmaker would dare to show on celluloid. Reality, as they rightly say, bites.

So here we are into fiction – where an Indian plane is hijacked by a couple of bearded terrorists who demand their jailed companion (another terrorist) to be released if the government wants to see the hostages alive. One of the hostages is a sweet little girl whose father, Vikram ( Shiney Ahuja ), coincidentally happens to be a maintenance officer at the airport where the plane lands for refueling.

Apparently not so much for the hundred-plus passengers as for his daughter, Vikram sneaks into the hijacked plane and, with the help of a sassy fight attendant ( Esha Deol ), eliminates one terrorist after another.

And you watch this conveniently unfolding plot sitting hostaged in your seat, wondering how ideal it would be if life imitated art.

Apart from the hijack drama the movie also has a secondary track about Vikram’s past – when his loving wife died in a previous hijack that also led to his demotion from a white-collared pilot to a blue-collared maintenance officer.

Like any true-blue Bollywood movie, ‘Hijack’, too, has a mandatory item number (this one’s on a Brazilian bombshell). And to add some mush to the proceedings there are intermittent flashbacks of the hero’s romantic past with his dead wife. But the most irritating are the subsidiary tracks featuring the passengers of the plane.

There’s hardly anything to write about performances. Shiney is lackluster, Esha is wooden. KK Raina as the head of the terrorists is unimpressive.

Yes, there is some unintended comic relief you get while seeing the fake panic expressions on the faces of the actors playing the passengers.

Ha. For this respite the movie gets half extra star than it deserves.

Rating: *1/2

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