Hijack '93

An illusion of a Thriller

I heard a lot about this movie from my friends. Out of curiosity, I decided to watch it. When I finished watching this movie, the realisation dawned on me that if I want to use the European and American stand point to critique this movie, I may be misjudging it.

Thus I decided to view the African standard to evaluate the movie and I was sad to say , it even fell short of that standard.

First , the movie built up a false tension and I was really geared up to see a thriller that would sway me. It takes just five minutes for me to revise my expectations because the tension and heart thumbing scenes I wanted to watch never materialised.

Secondly, I saw very little fear from the passengers. Even those ones look fake. This made the scenes unrealistic and hijacking a plane lean itself into fear and disorderliness.

Third, the movie did a flashback on the background of the hijackers which doesn't connect well with their reasons for hijacking a plane. I mean the relationship between the flashbacks and the terrorists' motive for hijacking the planes was unclear and ambiguous.

In the fourth place, the movie failed wholly to capitalise on the historical antecedent of the movie,which was the 1993 hijack of Nigerian Airways to lay a good background and context for the movie. Example , it could have created scenes or do a flashback to 17 November 1993 where Abacha toppled the interim government in a palace coup and then dissolved the legislature, as well as the state and local governments, and replaced the elected civilian state governors with military and police officers. This would have directly helped the viewers to understand why the young adults were attempting to hijack a plane to protest the usurpation of a democratically elected government.

Another observation is that, the characters themselves didn't seem to have enough background knowledge on their scripts. They took the script on the face value instead of digging deeper to get some context and setting for the movie.

Moreover , the actors and the entire set up didn't reflect a 1993 setting. Look at the guns, technology,clothes and food they're wearing. It doesn't look like the people were doing the hijacking in 1993. It looked too modern. This blatant anachronistic error cannot escape the critical eye.

In addition to all these, one can observe that the plane flew for just a few minutes and was forced to land. From that point on there are more talking in the landed plane than action. This quickly took the steam of the movie and reduced it to a mere talk show.

Finally, there were many unnecessary scenes like the subtle reference to a dentist not been a proper doctor,The excuse given by the supposed parliamentarian to go and urinate and trying to bribe one of the hijackers,the subtle attraction between one of the terrorists and the interpreter, the presence of the military men in the plane.

In summation, this movie is good for entertainment purposes but not a good enough one if you want to watch a real thriller.

This is badly made by based on an actual event happened in Nigeria. And apparently nobody hurt or died in real which is a relief. Considering this is a hijack of flying airplane but there is no intense or thrill at all.

Maybe acting is bad as well as its script.

The stories behind every hijacker are not developed well and their characters are also weak and vague.

Could make more interesting flashbacks of each hijacker so know more watchable.

There is no tension between hijackers and passengers or army officers.

This is disappointing, one of the worst hijack movie I have ever watched recently.

This is one hijack movie with a difference. There is less of action, more of conversation and a good portion of the movie deals with back stories of the young, naive and inexperienced hijackers. In all probability the real event had more excitement.

The director has not given the required pace to the narrative and the intermittent back stories of the four hijackers only served to slow down an already slow movie. These sob stories with bittersweet background music were rather over sentimental and boring. In any case poverty and misery of family members of hijackers could not be convincingly connected to a hijacking plan.

Nothing in the movie like direction, acting, dialogue can be considered even mediocre and is of a passable standard. The anxiety and tension of the passengers does not look realistic at all.

The scenes of negotiations however are done well. These are the redeeming feature of this uniformly insipid and unimpressive movie.

Hijack '93 on Netflix. The subject of Hijack is very dangerous. Be it is hijacking of aeroplane, bus, train, car, ship etc that deals with total terror in the eyes of the passengers and those who are hijacked. Their body languages totally go for toss during to terrible pressure of the highjackeers. In this film, the passengers hardly felt any pain or pressure may except one or two. All the passengers took the high acting very lightly. The direction is gone for a big toss. This not the way the director should project film. Further, there is no tension seen among the airport security where the plane lands. No government of either country is bothered about the situation. Negotiations/conversations are handled very badly. Acting and performances are mediocre. Overall, a very badly made film. Please give this film a huge MISS.

Making a movie takes a lot of work. Between casting and camera men, planning, location shoots, writing etc, the whole rigmarole can't be a walk in the park, you would expect people who take on a project like this would put a little effort into making something worth a persons time, or at least have some skill or ability. However, even with all the effort and money required, there are a lot of bad movies or there. Even bad movies I'll sometimes keep it on in the background and while scrolling through my phone, they may have a moment or two that catches my interest. But this movie isn't one of those movies; the acting, the dialogue, just everything is so bad that I turned it off within the first 10 minutes. How does it even make it to Netflix?