Hijack (2008) User Reviews

Unimpressive!

[pushpargha · 4/10 · 7 September 2008]

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!

Hijack the audiences

[cybersupam · 5/10 · 9 September 2008]

Do you want to be hijacked of watching this movie? If yes then it is for you. By the title it is not that difficult to imagine what is the story all about. Moreover there is nothing newly added storyline, and most parts are predictable as of what is going to happen in the next scene. For those who did not watch yet this time-passing thriller it would be better not to expect much. Just go with your own risk of spending some bucks on it and not regret later.

I mostly compare this with the brilliant movie Zameen directed by Rohit Shetty and casted Ajay and Abhishekh together which was also concerned with the release of a strong and powerful terrorist leader, for whom his free gang hijack the plane. But it was made with brilliant cinematography and performances were over the top. Whereas in Hijack there is not a single subject which can impress the audiences, not even newly introducing Air Indian air-hostess Kaveri Jha nor Shiny Ahuja. Kaveri has mini pivotal role but failed to capture the hearts of the audiences. If she acts again in future then hope that she is handled by a renowned director to improve her acting skill or else stay in her own career – air hostess.

Before the release of Hijack it has been informed that Shiny himself stunted most of the action scenes, and if so then he is simply alright. Some of the last plane chasing scenes remind me of Akshay Kumar in Khiladi 420, but in that case Shiny even can't score 50 within 100. Still then this is Shiny and not Akshay. I am mostly impressed by Esha Deol's performance as an air-hostess who has very important role in rescuing the passengers. She is appreciable by her appearances, although her role is innocent.

Anyway, Hijack is just for a short time spending movie, and is not a must watch. As long as the movie moves forward you are about to be entertained, or enjoy. But as it get to the end you would realise that you could have done something else. The only interesting thing I found in the whole movie is the surprising mischievous jobs done by the hijackers with the passengers inside the plane. They do one by one brutal murder with funny sequences and is someway noticing.

For those who have interests in general knowledge they would be highly impressed by the ending credits in which some true facts and histories about hijacking plane are presented.

Below Average Action / Thriller

[Pratik112 · 4/10 · 9 September 2008]

This movie has been inspired and perhaps even copied a bit by three if not four movies - "Die Hard," Die Hard 2," "Lethal Weapon" and "Raid On Entebbe." The latter is actually based on true story while this is not. I say that this is inspired by the movies that I have mentioned and not copied for the simple reason being that there are certain points that are not quite similar and the most obvious one is songs and the other being locations. But there are others as well.

Vikram Madan, a widow and a former airline pilot, is moved to being a ground maintenance officer after the air craft that he is piloting is high jacked and in which his wife is killed. But one day he gets informed that the aircraft that his daughter is travelling in, has been high jacked and unable to forget how his wife died and unable to get any help from the relevant authorities, he decides to take action.

Shiny Ahuja could have done a better job but unfortunately, the only scenes that have helped him and his character in this movie are action scenes. But Hema Malini and Dharmendra's daughter, Esha Deol, has again shown some improvement in her acting and perhaps now, may require a good director, even though Kunal Shivdasani has not done a bad job of this but it could have been better.

Being an action and a thriller genre movie, this lacked the ingredients to serve that type of impact as such a genre movie is capable of and therefore the thriller part of it seemed not to exist even though the title says it all. Besides the action in the film, the only other item that was good to know was the facts and the figures, related to high jacking which are shown at the end. There are some flaws in this but it would be better not to mention them.

Earlier I mentioned that this was inspired by "Raid On Entebbe," I still maintain that but there are a lot of similarities as well such as those of smuggling of weapons on the air craft.

Conclusion: Unfortunately, this is an below average movie, which due to the action sequences, may not be advisable to watch with children.

This is a boring movie

[sumanbarthakursmailbox · 2/10 · 19 December 2009]

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.

Another formula film

[nauman421 · 2/10 · 10 September 2008]

This is another formula film coming out of the latest edition of Indian producers' film manual......... put some Muslim names as terrorists, don't miss any opportunity to insult that religion, copy some scenes from Hollywood and old Indian movies and bingo......... I have never seen such a predictable movie before. The hero of the movie is first shown as a pilot or co-pilot when his wife got killed in some plane hijack and then he becomes the engineer and knows all the tricks and techniques about the airplanes. The plane is standing on the airport and Mr. Hero is digging in holes in plane's floor with a drill machine and no one listens to it. Looks like the movie is made in some hurry and no importance has been given to editing and script. 2 out of 10.

Bollywood's "Die-Hard" attempt with Kandahar backdrop

[AvinashPatalay · 27 March 2009]

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.

Poor !

[elshikh4 · 2/10 · 30 March 2010]

"Interesting" is a word that got no relation whatsoever to this movie. Wanna know why. Stick around..

Mr. (Shiny Ahuja) has NOTHING to be a lead of an action movie, or rather a movie. The guy got zero charisma, zero acting talent, and zero fighting capacities; to tell you the truth, I was wishing him murdered for all the time! Undoubtedly he was the most boring factor in here, since being angry, sad, happy all by the same dead face. He seemed on drugs or lacking so much sleep, wanting his job done anyway, anyhow. And by the way, according to the way he looks, I'm sure he has anemia!

The plot wasn't that bad, but why the shameful stealing from (Passenger 57 - 1992), and (Executive Decision - 1996)??!!! Some points bugged me very, such as: the scenes of the helpless ministers yakking and yakking and yakking forever, or how that ex-pilot learned all of these tricks which he pulled off against the baddies?? (the script could have made him a S.W.A.T instead!), or how the killings were extremely absurd; giving us a time to laugh more than feeling a fear. For little instance, the opportunist politician, who wanted to serve the terrorists for his own agenda, has been killed so dumbly by the terrorists in the time that he could have been useful for them even if on short-range!

The direction couldn't embody any kind of excitement AT ALL. The cadres got nothing to express, while it's supposed to be a thrilling action that takes place in its actual time. The atmosphere was mostly spiritless. Let alone the purely naive dealing with many matters like how some of the hijackers looked so idiot while walking and talking, how the airport's tower was having one constant cloudy image all along (it's awful back-projection!), how the plane takes off at the end; did you see a plane that takes off in nearly half an hour?!! And when the last fight between the lead and the main terrorist was shot in continuous rotating, I was laughing my head off, saying to myself; OK, this movie has nearly the wrong way to do everything!

There was some good sad song in the middle; thank God it didn't tend to make a dancing number through a flashback of one of the terrorists! Plus the presence of (Esha Deol), only her presence, since she was wholly wasted and irritatingly unused. But on the contrary, everything, from the budget to the twists to the fistfights to the CGI, was real poor. And when it shows before the closing credits boards about the history of planes' hijacking, I was sorry for a movie that couldn't achieve its basic mission (the enjoyable action), to beg any concern by adopting another mission (being a message movie!).

I was astonished when I found *strange* reviews that got the nerve to compare (Die Hard 2 - 1990) to (Hijack)?? It's like comparing Sidney Poitier to Chris Rock! For being merciful, I may go and compare it to Jim Wynorski's (Crash Landing - 2005), and in this case, just this case, (Hijack) will find something to top! It is nothing but another B movie; small, little campy, and generally not interesting. I believe all the movie's problems are related to the fact that (Kunal Shivdasani) is the one who wrote, directed, produced, and edited it single-handedly, in the first time he does any of that as well!

Still, what could be its brutal side is the fact of its long running time. It's just inhuman to follow (Shiny Ahuja) doing anything for 2 seconds, so how about 2 HOURS!!!

Horrible

[prmvrsn · 1/10 · 1 April 2019]

This movie is so horrible and terrible that when you finish the movie you are either going to cry because you regret watching it or you going to curse yourself that why did my mind agree to watch this trash. The plot of this movie is so stupid that your own mind will turn into the same mind of the person who wrote the script of this film. There are so unrealistic scenes in the movie like how does a person sneak into an aircraft like that's such a dumb idea.Another dumb thing about this film is that when the terrorists find out about Shiney Ahuja all the passengers disappear except Shiney Ahuja's daughter.The acting of Shiney Ahuja was fabulous Esha Deol was whatever the terrorists were pretty good the passengers did pathetic acting like the passengers were crying for the whole movie.The music is lovely of the film and that's what drew me to watch the film but it was the complete opposite.Also the violence in this movie is so tremendous that it is going to make you fall asleep.If you watch this movie there is nothing you are going to see except people getting killed or the passengers crying. I strongly encourage everyone not to watch this film if you still want to watch it bang your head in the floor and then see if you are interested

Run of the mill--no thrill

[saxena_ashes · 5/10 · 12 October 2008]

Small films are in. Shot completely inside an aircraft, the movie, as the name suggests, is about a plane hijacked by 6 terrorists demanding release of their boss.

Shiny Ahuja, the ground maintenance engineer, manages to sneak in when the airplane is forced to land at Chandigarh airport. Nothing other than the expected follows when he kills them one by one and frees the hostages, his daughter being one of them.

Oh yes, the star-cast has Esha Deol too, as an air-hostess who doesn't have to do anything anyway. The movie failed to create any interest, the age-old formula used, with no thrill whatsoever.

This Was An O.K Movie!

[alimrafiq94 · 6/10 · 10 September 2008]

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!