The second season of Hijack (Apple TV) is set on an underground train in Berlin. For that reason alone, it would never work in Ireland. The service would either be cancelled out of the blue – “all tickets will be honoured by Dublin Bus” – or the carriages would already be overrun with vaping louts far scarier than any international terrorists.
But this is Berlin, a city where nice things are possible. Which is why Idris Elba’s Sam Nelson – an everyman in the vein of Die Hard’s John McClane – has opted to travel by U-Bahn rather than take a taxi to his meeting with British embassy officials. But something is off from the start – much like Roy Scheider in Jaws 2, Nelson is twitchy and sees potential threats everywhere.
He alerts security to a man with an iffy backpack – but when they chuck the innocent commuter off, they are accused by bystanders of racial profiling. There’s something up with the driver too, who seems to have turned up for work the worse for wear.
Series one of Hijack was a lightning-in-a-bottle event – an Apple thriller that cut through and was a big hit. It had an old-school, 1970s heist flick quality, with Elba giving good action hero as he tackled terrorists who had taken over a flight to Dubai.
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Second time out, the producers have tried something different by chucking in a huge twist at the end of episode one. It’s an impressive feat of rug-pulling that calls into question everything you have seen before.
Elsewhere, there are parallels with the 1974 classic The Taking of Pelham 123, starring the fantastically rumpled duo of Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau as the hijackers of a New York subway train and the cop trying to free the hostages. One of the great joys of that film was the fast moving and unfussy plot. Such straightforwardness was likewise a feature of Hijack series one.
Alas, second time out, it’s all too convoluted. Elba looks uncomfortable with the direction he is asked to take Nelson in – and his fellow passengers on the train are either anonymous or annoying (in the case of a gang of British students).
[ Hijack: An excellent showcase for Idris Elba - shame about the angry IrishmenOpens in new window ]
Not to labour the point, but it’s also a tough watch for Irish viewers – for whom the ultimate fantasy is the show’s depiction of functioning public transport. Here’s a pitch for Apple: next time, Elba fights his toughest opponent yet – a remorseless army of ghost buses, ruthlessly engineered to let you down when you least suspect. The problem, of course, would be that, outside of Ireland, nobody would ever believe it.
