There is a specific sound a plastic airline coffee stirrer makes when it snaps under the thumb of a stressed character in a thriller, and Kunal Shivdasani's 2008 action entry Hijack uses that exact sound about four times too many during its tense first act. If I'm honest, it's a small thing that bugged me straight away, well before the masked men with submachine guns even breached the cabin doors to terrorize the passengers of a flight bound for Chandigarh. We are in familiar territory here, trading on the claustrophobia that made Neill Blomkamp's District 9 feel so suffocating later on, except our enclosed space is a commercial jetliner rather than an alien-segregated slum. Bollywood movies have historically struggled with the logistics of cinematic geography once characters are airborne, often confusing the geography of a Boeing 747 interior with the cavernous expanses of a Mehboob Studio soundstage where background extras can mill about without bumping into luggage bins.

Shiney Ahuja plays Vikram Madan, an ex-commando whose daughter happens to be on board the hijacked flight, putting him in that tired position of having to fix a systemic failure through sheer paternal stubbornness and a lot of jumping over rows of economy seating. Ahuja plays this with a permanent scowl that suggests he just smelled something slightly unpleasant in the galley, offering a performance that is not great, not bad, just there, functioning mostly as a blunt instrument to move the narrative from one bulkhead confrontation to the next. He lacks the wired, desperate energy that John Abraham brought to similar material, settling instead for a stolid, stoic heroics that treats every crisis like a minor administrative inconvenience requiring a stern talking-to and an eventual roundhouse kick.

K.K. Raina and Mona Ambegaonkar populate the periphery as various government officials and bureaucrats sweating out the crisis in makeshift control rooms on the ground, shouting into oversized landline telephones while monitors display low-resolution graphics that scream 2008 digital aesthetic. The screenplay, credited to a committee of minds who apparently studied old copies of Die Hard and Air Force One while riding the local commuter train, has a frustrating habit of stopping dead in its tracks just as the momentum builds, forcing characters to explain their backstories through awkward dialogue exchanges that feel entirely lifted from afternoon television dramas. Kaveri Jha does what she can with a thankless role as a flight attendant caught in the crossfire, though her dubbing is noticeably out of sync during two crucial close-ups in the third reel, a technical lapse that pulls you right out of the illusion of mortal peril.

The cinematography by Amalendu Chaudhary tries desperately to inject kinetic panic into static situations by shaking the camera violently whenever an engine revs or a terrorist cocks a firearm, which mostly results in a muddy visual soup where you cannot quite tell which henchman is falling down the aisle. Hindi cinema often relies on these hyper-kinetic visual crutches when the underlying blocking of a scene fails to generate real tension, substituting actual spatial geography with dizzying edits that disorient the viewer rather than thrill them. The soundtrack hits you over the head with predictable orchestral stings whenever someone looks intently out a window or checks their wristwatch, leaving very little room for silence to do the heavy lifting during moments of genuine psychological pressure.

Yet there is a weirdly compelling grit to how the film handles the mechanics of state response, avoiding the glossy patriotism of later franchise entries and instead painting the bureaucracy as incompetent and slow-moving. You get the sense that the filmmakers actually wanted to make something resembling a gritty procedural before the studio notes forced them to graft on a standard hero's journey for the male lead, resulting in a fractured narrative identity that never quite gels into a cohesive whole. When the villains finally start making their demands known, the motivations shift from political ideology to personal grievance so quickly that you half expect someone to pull off a rubber mask and reveal an entirely different antagonist altogether.

Hijack remains a fascinating curio from an era when Hindi films were desperately trying to match western action aesthetics on a fraction of the budget, leaning heavily on tropes borrowed wholesale from Hollywood while retaining the melodramatic emotional beats that local audiences expected from their weekend entertainment. It does not reinvent the action genre, nor does it completely embarrass itself during its ninety-odd minutes of running time, occupying that vast, gray middle ground where most genre exercises live and die without leaving much of a cultural footprint behind. You watch it, you track the predictable trajectories of the various plot threads, and by the time the credits roll over a generic pop-rock track, you are already reaching for your shoes to leave the theater.