Hijack (2008)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It's a horrible thing to say, but hijacks and hostage situations lend themselves to such high-strung drama and nail-biting tension, they almost always serve as an interesting subject for thriller films. Shiny Ahuja-Esha Deol starrer Hijack which opens at cinemas this week, takes what could have been a perfectly exciting premise and botches it up irreparably. An Amritsar-bound passenger airplane is hijacked by a group of terrorists who force land the flight at Chandigarh airport, and demand the release of a militant in exchange of passengers' lives. Shiny Ahuja stars as chief of maintenance at Chandigarh airport, who sneaks into the grounded flight to overpower the terrorists. His daughter is on the flight, you see. What's more, a hijack situation isn't a new experience for Shiny, who lost his wife in a similar incident some years ago while he was employed as flight captain. Esha Deol, plays an airhostess on this doomed flight, who lends Shiny a helping hand. Unbelievably idiotic, the script of Hijack is so ridiculous, it's hard to imagine how actors and producers signed up to be a part of this venture. Not only is the screenplay an uneven mish-mash of predictable scenes, the characters are all caricatures from typical Bollywood films, and they spout the kind of dialogue that they stopped writing way back in the eighties. To give you an idea of just how mind-boggingly stupid this film is, let me tell you terrorists sneak guns on this plane by hiding them in farsan packets; and an air-hostess must make out with a corpse on another occasion. This film is so embarrassingly incompetent, I think the passengers who got killed by the hijackers on this flight should consider themselves lucky they didn't live long enough to endure the indignity of walking out of that plane alive and being pelted with eggs by disgruntled viewers of this film.

Noble intentions I am sure and on paper must have been a sure-shot winner. Sadly the project gets Lost in Translation.The plot simply fails to connect and numerous attempts to kick-start the interest in plot doesn't yield results. The entire plot is inspired from Kandahar hijacking episode and a lot of sub-plots are built around it (the newly-wedded couple, the wily politician etc). Shiny Ahuja's redemption doesn't help much either. His desperate attempt to be Bruce Die-Hard Willis takes him nowhere. Eesha Deol was pathetic, absolutely no screen presence at all. Sleepwalking eh?K K Raina tries to infuse life as Rasheed Omar but gives up in between.Had the movie been made just after the Kandahar episode, perhaps it would have had buyer, but today Hijack is well-past its sell-by-date.PS: Rohit Shetty's "Zameen" was relatively well handled on the subject of Kandahar hijacking.

To start off, at the end of the movie the text says that this event happened in real involving Chinese hijackers and a plane, but in this movie they just show a bunch of Muslim extremists hijacking an Indian Hindu plane! WTF!! But the story was pretty good, (BTW, this Bollywood movie does copy other Hollywood titles like Flight Plan and other Blockbusters) Here is a briefing; a fathers daughter gets trapped in a hijacking and decides to save her since the government is threatened not to do anything. FYI, the father was a victim of a previous hijacking where is wife was killed and everything went wrong because of him. That's why he panics when his daughter is a victim this hijacking. Nevertheless, he saves his daughter, kills the hijackers, gets a crush on a flight attendant that helped him out, and they live happily ever after!... But I have just wasted 3 happy hours of mine already by watching this movie! I do recommend this movie to someone who gets touched in the heart by crying clips and fake fighting clips. Other than that, this is a more of a boyish movie made into a girlish emotional movie. Good luck watching it if your still interested!

With the standard that is being set by the new age directors and scriptwriters in the age of contemporary film industry, Hijack was a bad deal.It was unimpressive to see a movie with mediocrity with old concepts and plots being put amidst a chain of highly thought of and well conceptualized movies.It brings down the standards and pushes the industry a step back. With the likes of Mumbai meri Jaan, A Wednesday, Aamir, Taaren Zameen Par etc setting high standards in their respective genres and making a deep impact on the mindset of the viewers and eventually changing their tastes of Hindi films, a film like hijack spoils everything.It's not a very bad movie for which I would mercilessly thrash it but its a movie being made in the wrong time or I'd probably say a movie very lately made. Hijack being made 6 or 7 years back probably would have been a success but now it looks like an old school thought which will not be accepted by the present mass and moreover there was nothing special when it came to the technicalities of its making.Performances from esha deol and other supporting characters were just not good.Esha looked like she was desperately trying to give in a powerful acting performance and failing badly in the end.The events featuring the passenger characters during the hijack always looked familiar with the terrorists killing some of them and the threats that they posed on all of them time and time again and the way the passengers reacted.Many scenes reminded us of the film Zameen previously made on a similar hijack story and also on occasions reminded one of the Harrison Ford starrer Hollywood Hit Air Force one and off course elements of the hero(Shiny Ahuja) coming in and killing the terrorists in the plane one by one and saving all the passengers including his daughter in the end was so very stereotypic.Shiny Ahuja wasted himself in this project.There was no element of thrill.It all looked coming.Every sequence was expectedly placed one after the other and had no surprise elements.There were no twists and turns that would draw the interest of the viewers. The director didn't do anything at all to make any educated movie viewer say "WOW" OR " MAZAA AA GAYA"(I had fun). Some of the events looked so very unrealistic and boring like the behaviour and mannerisms of the terrorists on plane during the hijack when doing their acts of threatening and killing. In real life they looked like some school boys for whom the police dept would have been enough to be taken care of.I can go on saying all the negative points but I think all of you by now must have understood what I want to say. Sorry to say, but it was disappointing!