A few months ago, Netflix premiered Luther: The Fallen Sun, the movie spin-off of the TV crime thriller Luther, starring Idris Elba as a restless detective who’s constantly defying his superiors at Scotland Yard and matching wits with serial killers in London. The Fallen Sun was, in a word, terrible—written by the series creator, Neil Cross, sure enough, but distressingly out of touch with the original appeal of his characters and concept, as suddenly Cross seemed determined to turn Luther into Saw. This was at least consistent with the general decline of the series since its middling third season aired in 2013; Luther has at this point put fans through more bad hours of television than good. Once rugged, DCI John Luther has gone ragged. Send him to Vauxhall Cross or send him his pension, I don’t care; send him away!
There’s no salvaging Luther, I suppose, and that’s a shame, because Elba really does excel as a leading man in this sort of violent, high-strung television thriller. Luckily, on Wednesday, Apple TV+ premiered Hijack, in which Elba plays the enigmatic hostage Sam Nelson in a real-time seven-episode series about a hijacked commercial flight from Dubai to London Heathrow. The sold-out Kingdom Airlines flight is the central stage, but we also follow a variety of external perspectives, including those of Sam’s ex-wife and their son, awaiting him in London. Hijack will inevitably remind you of a few different things: Air Force One, Inside Man, 24, The Commuter. But Elba really owns this role. Apple TV hasn’t reinvented the hostage thriller with Hijack, but Elba is having some good fun with the form. And though it pains me to say it, I also believe he’s finally making a clean break from Luther.
Sam Nelson is a bit more spoiled than John Luther, admittedly. Sam strolls to the designated gate with a dainty gift bag and no carry-on luggage. He’s flying first class. He works in mergers and acquisitions. He’s “the best at handling … the negotiation,” as his son and his ex-wife explain at one point. Once guns are drawn onboard, Sam is out of his seat and chatting at gunpoint at every opportunity. He’s a Swiss Army knife of a man: a body language expert, crisis communications adviser, high-stakes game theorist, hacker, chaplain, spy. But chiefly, Sam thrives in this situation through his utter inscrutability at every turn. He makes himself useful enough to the hijackers—anticipating problems, flagging weaknesses in their game plan—to earn some grudging, fleeting favor at points but is troublesome enough to subtly sabotage their plans, even with his hands tied. Sam moves through the cabin with disastrous confidence, daring the hijackers to just shoot him already. Their reluctance to do so is yet another mystery of Hijack.
The five hijackers include a white girl who weighs no more than 140 pounds and a gray gentleman built like Michael Caine in Harry Brown. They’re an odd bunch. Their diversity seems engineered from a casting perspective to avoid saddling any one ethnic group with any unfortunate stereotypes but also from a dramatic perspective to enhance the early intrigue as everyone wonders: Who even are these people? Elba plays opposite Neil Maskell’s Stuart, the leader of the hijackers. Stuart is the load-bearing personality: He is stern, withholding, determined, and conspicuously more eager than his subordinates to shoot hostages. He’s still more henchman than boss, as he’s clearly following instructions from a higher power, but his battle of wits with Sam is engrossing. Stuart is dangerously unsure what to see in Sam—a nuisance, a rival, a peer?
Everyone struggles to see Sam’s endgame. Though he’s initially sitting in first class, Sam at one point gets himself dragged to the back of the plane and seated with two older gentlemen who—on a flight from Dubai, mind you—plan to get up and bum-rush anyone who’s speaking Arabic and thus heroically foil the attack. Sam begs them to confront the limits of their understanding and consider the risks of moving too early: They don’t yet know what they don’t yet know. Sam is inquisitive in the extreme. Less than an hour into the hijacking, he is given the opportunity to kill Stuart and potentially end his insurrection before it’s even properly gotten started. Instead, Sam hands Stuart’s own gun back to him as a sign of his willingness to cooperate at the expense of other passengers, if it means earning a bit of goodwill with the hijackers to save his own ass. Throughout the series, Sam and Stuart both wax philosophical about zero-sum games and self-preservation, but you know Sam is a family man, and you get the sense these two men ultimately stand for very different things.
The hijackers are a mystery in themselves. What criminal element is this? What’s their endgame? What could they possibly stand to gain, with any lasting effect, from such an outrageous mission? The answers are somewhat ridiculous, even by the standards of the genre. Hijack is a much better show when you’re thinking less about the motivation of the hijackers and more about the immediate tension in their onboard interactions. The hijackers really are overextended; the hostages are constantly scurrying between the huge blind spots in their patrols of the plane. The two old guys probably could take the 140-pound white woman. But they have no reason to believe the hijackers intend to crash the plane. So everyone sits tight, and the rebellion materializes only in fits and starts. Stuart isn’t the brightest bulb. You assume Sam will ultimately outwit him. But how?
Though he’s once again playing a middle-aged divorcé, Idris Elba seems rejuvenated in Hijack. The problem with Luther, perhaps, was its very serialization. It’s a crime procedural, but an especially brutal one willing to wreck its characters over the years. Ripley is dead. Alice is missing. Schenk is no longer his old, fearsome self. You’re ultimately reduced to a lonely cop who’s got nothing left to prove, really, and no more family and friends to bury. Luther’s wit is a vanishingly small comfort at that point—and even the wit was in short supply. The Fallen Sun ended, in all seriousness, with Luther weighing a job offer from MI-6. This was after he broke out of prison (long story) to stop Andy Serkis’s character from livestreaming torture porn from a bunker in Norway. I daresay Sam Nelson is proving a bit more useful to his majesty. Hijack picks up where Luther went wrong, putting Elba on the first flight back to first-rate television intrigue.
Justin Charity
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