HIJACK

Feel like a jackass!

DIRECTOR: Kunal Shivdasani

ACTORS: Shiney Ahuja, Esha Deol

It’s only words. How can they quite adequately sum up an unimaginable hilariousness healthily reproduced for your viewing pleasures alone? That’s why, I’d prefer if you didn’t laze around this review, and watched this film instead. It’s serious fun. It starts off as that (which I shall concentrate on), and trust me, never disappoints you thereafter. We’re seated across a table with the home minister of this nation; the three service chiefs; and a gentleman, who appears more important than all of them, the head of India’s Anti-terrorism Squad. The gentleman shows us clips of an egghead with black fungus pasted from ear to ear, grinning and grimacing over taking control of the whole world some day. He is behind bars. A turbaned man in the room, the super-boss of India’s police, looks mischievously away from the camera and blurts to the effect, “Shod vee ancounter heem?” No, suggests the ATS chief. He’s behind blasts at several European capitals. We need to find out his future plans.

It may beat most that no one has ever done a background check on the ATS chief himself, this sole keeper of our nation’s security. This Mr Kumar could well himself be a top-shot terrorist Sheikh Abdullah or Shiraj-ud-Daula or any other Muslim name, which this Islamophobe flick makes a dictionary of. The home minister incidentally has a sexy secretary Simone. She figures out the gentleman’s identity quite easily. If you suspect a spoiler in here, do not fret. The more I let you in on the secrets, the more eager you’re likely to get to catch this movie’s precious treasures.

The film is called Hijack. You know there’s going to be one. You also know the egg-head will ask to be released in exchange of hostages on a flight that, for some reason, is kept unnamed. A tragedy of such magnitude needs to be humanised. So we watch a kid at a night-club making travel plans with her three friends without her parents knowing about it. A little later (after an ‘item number’, of course), the night-club is blown into bits. A blast comes cheap; it costs only some computer-generated images. We could do with more. Never mind the bomb, the four buddies somehow land up in the said flight. Life is normal, along with the other bunch of abnormal people on the plane that shall remain unnamed.

The film has a stunt-hero swinging from a helicopter, who’ll rescue the hostages: another thing the promos tell you. They may not have shown you how he chases the aircraft on the runway hanging on a mobile staircase, before he calls in a helicopter in a matter of seconds.
This brooding loner of ours (Shiney Ahuja) is the source of most fun actually. Even Rambos have a past. This one imagines the first time he bumped into a random girl at a bar. She left in a hurry. She never gave him her phone number. But they began singing and wining and dancing and bearing a child in a rare dream-sequence within a flashback.

That wife is no more. The child, in a boarding school now, is going to board the ill-fated flight. “You must fasten your seat-beats,” the father dutifully informs her over the phone. We sit warned.

The plane is made to forcibly land at the same airport where our champion leading-man is the top mechanic. He gets in drilling a hole into the plane. He first knocks down the hijacker who’d smuggled in a gun in his Haldiram Bhujiawala packet. He takes on the other one as well. There are two more bumbling beards to go.

By now the air-hostess on board (Esha Deol) just cannot take it. She finally nasals in, on behalf of her audience, “Do you know what a hijack is? Do you know what a hijack means?” Most would look up a dictionary. Our hero tells us he was once the pilot of a plane that was hijacked!
Alright, amigos. Unimaginable as it were, someone actually filmed this stupendous toy-shop. Someone actually funded it. The least you can do is take along a group of giggles, grab the frontrow aisle seats, and enjoy.