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.

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!

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.

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!