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The first season of Hijack saw Idris Elba playing a taciturn man named Sam Nelson, who found himself fending off terrorists on a seven-hour flight, when all he was trying to do was get a gift of jewellery home to his estranged wife. Playing out in real time, it was a ridiculous, over-the-top, unapologetically daft action series, in which the sheer charisma of Elba proved enough to disarm criminals and get everyone to do exactly what he asked of them. Few brain cells were required but it was an exhilarating and thrilling seven hours of nonsense.
To bring back a series based on such a specific concept requires a considerable amount of chutzpah. Another hijacked plane would stretch the credulity of even this show, so instead, its return follows the playbook written by the similarly dumb-and-fun 1990s action film Speed and its sequel, Speed 2. The latter followed the hijacking of a bus with the not-very-convincing hijacking of a ship, and here, Sam similarly jumps modes of transport, moving from the air to the underground.
We meet him once again in a snowy Berlin, during the morning rush hour, as he descends the escalators at Berlin Hauptbahnhof and makes his way on to the U-Bahn. He looks tense and tormented, as you might, if you were prone to getting hijacked every time you set foot on public transport. (Season three, surely, will be a toss-up between a Lime bike and a tram.) Unfortunately for Sam’s fellow passengers, this is not going to be a simple hop from station to station.
The train is, of course, taken under control by nefarious forces, and Sam is at the centre of the action, though this time, our hero is much altered by personal tragedy. In season one, his quiet insistence that everyone should defer to him made him a sort of superhero, albeit one without any supernatural powers. This time, he cuts a less certain figure. The British Embassy and German police all battle to take control of the situation, but as the train trundles on, the destination of the story becomes much less clear, its thrills replaced by a grim claustrophobia.
This makes it much more bleak than its initial outing, which is quite an achievement, given that season one had such a high body count. In attempting to avoid a simple do-over, it throws in a handful of enormous twists and turns, which have the effect of pulling out the rug from underneath the viewer. It works in terms of its shock factor, but it also feels a little like being cheated or tricked. Hijack remains routinely entertaining, then, but it has lost its sense of fun.
★★★☆☆
On Apple TV+ from January 14
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