The best thriller of the year is a TV show about Idris Elba on an airplane

The 90s are still very much alive in the skies over Europe, at least in the new Apple TV Plus series hijack. The twisty international thriller follows a group of passengers trying to survive a hijacking on a seven-hour flight from Dubai to London. It’s exactly the kind of mid-budget excitement that would have provided one of the most popular films in the world 30 years ago, but has since largely disappeared. Fortunately, after five episodes, hijack is proof that the good old fashioned thriller isn’t completely extinct.

hijack‘s band of resourceful passengers is led by self-proclaimed leader Sam Nelson (Idris Elba), a closing man who specializes in closing business deals for major international corporations. As the reality of their hijacking becomes clear, Nelson springs into action, trying to calm down and negotiate with the perpetrators and ensure that everyone on the plane lands safely. He’s also where the ’90s flair really starts.

Like the best Jack Ryans and regular protagonists before him, Sam isn’t an ex-special unit or secretly a spy. He’s not a tough action hero or a super genius who also studied Krav Maga. He happens to be doing a job that requires him to close deals under high pressure, and he’s very good at it. So when he’s in a crisis, he turns the whole hijacking into one big business negotiation because that’s something he knows he can win.

The character also taps into some incredible strength from Elba, delivering compelling dialogue in a way that never lets other characters forget that he’s working for his own best interests first and foremost. Early in the show, Sam tries to convince the main hijacker, Stuart (Neil Maskell), to help, not because he wants to hijack the plane, but because he wants to survive. The camera lingers on Stuart’s face as he is slowly beaten down by Sam’s logic and the pressures of the situation until all he can fall back on is an uncomfortable kind of confidence.

It’s a spectacular dynamic that the show makes good use of, especially in the fifth episode when things finally get a little violent and Stuart needs to be calmed down. Sam is always smarter than whoever he’s talking to, and both parties know that. The fact is that Sam gives strength, but makes everyone else uncomfortable. When talking to him, both the hijackers and the other passengers are constantly on the mental calculus trying to figure out how they are being tricked, or if Sam is just telling a slightly venomous version of the truth.

Aside from just giving us the right kind of hero to root for, hijack is exceptionally good at placing the suspenseful parts of a thriller in exactly the order they should be. Questions that seem like common sense are almost always answered by characters, and everyone takes logical steps to solve the problems. If you saw a loophole or clear next step, chances are someone else on the plane did too and is about to say it out loud. It’s the kind of clever writing and audience confidence that’s rare in modern thrillers, which all too often leave huge logical gaps to keep the suspense high or overexplain each moment and make the camera think of solutions to the make audiences feel smart.

Image: Apple TV Plus

Balancing all this tension and cleverness for 90 minutes is a challenge most movies can’t handle, but still hijack manages to spread it elegantly over seven episodes. The show creates natural ebbs and flows in the action and suspense, carefully building each episode to its own impressively suspenseful climax, without feeling guilty about the standard one-hour running time for most modern dramatic television. Sure, each episode can run for a full hour, but usually the show sticks to a solid and entertaining 45 minutes.

Everything about hijack feels pulled from another era, in the best way possible. From the airtight tension to the hero who prefers to get out of trouble with his mouth rather than his fists, it feels like the return of the ’90s thriller… just on TV instead of the cinema.

hijack now streaming on Apple TV Plus, where five of the season’s seven episodes have already been released.