Hijack ’93 starts off with some intrigue but progresses into yet another
disappointment from Play Network. Efiko Score: 3/10.
Before it begins, Hijack ’93 makes sure to let its viewer know that it is by no means a truthful retelling of a real-life hijack in the 1990s. What this Netflix picture, directed by Robert Peters and written by Musa Jeffery David, wants to do is add its own fictional spin on that event.
Adam Garba, Nnamdi Agbo, Allison Emmanuel, and Akinsola Oluwaseyi are the hijackers, working under the orders of a man known as the Teacher (Sam Dede). They are to hijack a Nigerian Airways plane, and commandeer it to Frankfurt, as a means of voicing their discontent over the Nigerian government’s subversion of a presidential election. Then, they’ll begin their lives anew in Germany.
This as an interesting setup but the audience gets nothing as the film progresses. Not a remotely compelling (or even just mildly interesting) backstory for the quartet beyond singular background character traits. As the movie goes on, there’s even less in terms of defining their motivations and intentions. Nothing is developed, nothing is given flesh. The film moves from scene to scene without any real plot development.
The acting from the cast doesn’t do itself any justice; it fails to compensate for an under-developed story. Characters talk to each other as those reading lines off a script. The dialogue is bland, repetitive, and empty. There are scenes where Sam Dede repeats words “what makes a man” and “revolution” without giving any sort of explanation as to what he means. At best, words from the screenplay are nothing more than tools to move a barely existing plot forward; at worst, those words merely fill the film’s runtime.
As with other projects from production company Play Network, it is in regard to production value that Hijack ’93 comes alive. The film looks good and there is some subtlety in details. For instance, when soldiers and reporters appear on the scene, there’s a clear attempt to show a delineation between Nigeria from Niger. But while this is admirable, it doesn’t necessarily indicate that the story is set in 1993.
That quality does end up making Hijack ’93 a film trying to look cool, instead of being a story trying to be good. The final nail on the ilm’s shoddy coffin comes when the conclusion undoes the feeble character motivations and intentions already built. The filmmakers concoct a twist that serves no relevance given that we’ve reached the story’s end. The climax ends up leaving far too much unresolved and unanswered.
Hijack ’93 isn’t the first Play Network Studios movie to aim for visual appeal and try to base itself on a cultural phenomenon from Nigeria’s past. But like Nneka the Pretty Serpent, Rattlesnake, and the Aki and Pawpaw movie before it, this latest production falls into the same category: too much noise but too little quality.
