APPLE TV+: Hijack
Here’s the checklist that I imagine Idris Elba’s agent runs down before he sends his client a job offer. The actor’s character has to be:
- Smarter than everyone else in the room, airplane or nation.
- Chiller, too.
- Smolderingly sexual.
- Able to solve the knottiest dilemma without breaking a sweat.
- Shadowed by a complicated past with a gorgeous woman who claims to be over him but is not (see: smolderingly sexual).
- Unwilling to divulge if he prefers his martini shaken or stirred, because that intel is on a need-to-know basis; besides, he’s a better mixologist than anyone else in the room/airplane/nation.
All those traits are checked off with Elba’s latest role as Sam Nelson in Apple TV+’s suspenseful thriller Hijack. The seven-episode series, concluding August 2, plants him in a jet traveling from Dubai to London.
Things start going weird in episode one, when a passenger discovers something that shouldn’t be found in an airline bathroom: a single, unspent bullet. Sure enough, there’s some bad people on the plane — four men and one surly woman, all British. They take over the cockpit thanks to the leverage of knowing the captain is sleeping with one of his flight attendants. Then they shut off the plane’s Wi-Fi — but not fast enough to keep Sam from sending a text to his estranged wife (Christine Adams), hinting that something is amiss on Flight 29.
Co-created by George Kay, a writer involved with the Netflix series’ Lupin, Criminal and season one of Killing Eve, Hijack delivers the transatlantic professionalism you’d hope for. It’s driven by Elba’s gravelly sangfroid as he susses the situation with the increasingly dangerous hijackers and panicked passengers, willing to act as a mediator between these opposing forces even at the risk of looking unreliable in the eyes of his fellow hostages.
The show’s best scenes keep us claustrophobically stuck in the aircraft cabin as Sam tries to second guess and circumvent the motive of the hijackers, led primarily by one guy (Stuart Atterton) with a quickly shortening fuse.
Perforce, the show also has to drop down to earth occasionally to see what’s happening in London. The dawning awareness that there’s undeclared danger in the approaching jet — figured out mainly by a no-nonsense traffic controller (Eve Myles) — heightens the drama on the ground. By contrast, when the show checks in with Sam’s ex and their teenage son, the family dynamics are boringly familiar from a thousand other shows. But the ratio of exciting to been-there-done-that is good. Even if you’ve seen Idris Elba play an Idris Elba role exactly like this before, nobody does it better.
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NETFLIX: They Cloned Tyrone
Shot in Atlanta, the socially conscious conspiracy comedy-thriller They Cloned Tyrone centers on drug dealer Fontaine (John Boyega) working the beat-down streets of a hood called The Glen. He’s constantly trying to get money owed to him by frenemy Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), a pimp whose best worker is Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). These three are at the heart of a weirdness that kicks off when Fontaine gets shot to death by a rival dealer — and wakes up the next day like nothing happened, with no memory of his demise.
They Cloned Tyrone plays like a mix of Groundhog Day, The Truman Show, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and even Apple TV+’s recent Silo. The building blocks aren’t exactly new. There’s even a behavioral-control element tied to a fast-food chain called Got Damn! Fried Chicken that’s like the plot engine that Bing Bang Burgers provides in Prime Video’s I’m a Virgo.
What distinguishes Tyrone is the interplay of its central trio and the absurd grace notes of some of the dialogue. The best of it comes from Parris’ Yo-Yo, whether she’s enthusing over the architectural “good bones” of a trap house she’s just busted into or warning Fontaine not to go back out on the streets because “the block is hotter than a fresh perm.” (Some of the lines have the spring of improv, but the script is credited to director Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier.)
Not as smart as it thinks it is but lively enough in its interplay of comic urban shoot-em-up and social commentary, this can be seen as the latest in the tradition of Netflix’ summertime-original-genre-film-with-stars (Compare last year’s The Gray Man, starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, and Day Shift, also starring Foxx, alongside David Franco and Snoop Dogg.). Oh, and just so you know? Nobody named Tyrone shows up in They Cloned Tyrone. The title is adapted from an Erykah Badu song.
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NETFLIX: Wham!
Maybe it helps to have personal memories of the quick, sweet prevalence of their Earwig tunes over the space of just three years of the 1980s. But even younger people should enjoy the informative, blissfully short band-o-pic Wham! Personally, though I liked a bunch of the late George Michael’s solo work, the disposable pop he created with partner Andrew Ridgeley from 1983 to their farewell concert in ’86 defined escapist summer music.
Like a lot of people — probably because he gamely ceded focus to the hip-swiveling Michael in their adorably primitive music videos — I used to think Ridgeley was a pretty-boy hanger-on, somebody briefly warmed by George’s sun-kissed glow. Wham! corrects that misconception. Ridgeley and Michael (born Georgios Panayiotou) met as 12-year-olds and formed their first band as teens. Ridgeley was the driving force, and, when they hit the big time at age 22, they were fully equals.
While it puts George Michael’s emerging gay identity into the mix and explores the compromises he made to delay his coming out (a decision he came to regret), director Chris Smith (Fyre and an executive producer of Tiger King) keeps the focus tight on the 1980s heyday of the two-man band and their personal/professional bond. While Ridgeley and Michael were never a romantic couple, by the end of the documentary, you realize you’ve been watching a love story.
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NETFLIX: The Deepest Breath
You’ll experience the greatest impact if you don’t know much about the two people at the heart of Laura McGann’s documentary The Deepest Breath. They’re an Italian woman in her 20s named Alessia Zecchini and an Irishman in his 30s, Stephen Keenan, who meet with a shared passion for the same nutty extreme sport: free diving.
That’s the one where you plunge down, on a single breath, as deep as you can toward the ocean floor . . . and somehow make it back to the surface alive. (The sport has a long history of fatalities.) Keenan and Zecchini meet when Alessia is competing to break the world’s record, aiming for 104 meters, or around 30 skyscraper floors, and Stephen is working as one of the leading safety divers, trying to keep people like Alessia alive. The story is compelling and sometimes nerve-shredding and suspenseful. It’s also stunningly beautiful. Watch it on the biggest screen you can.
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NETFLIX: Bird Box Barcelona and Run Rabbit Run
Back in 2018, Netflix produced a stupid movie that became such a hit with viewers, you’d’ve thought the pandemic had already stuck us inside and lowered all our standards (see: Tiger King). The Sandra Bullock vehicle Bird Box — a knockoff of A Quiet Place, only with sight rather than sound as the human-vs.-alien challenge — was underwhelming for me. Maybe it’s because I had lowered expectations, but the Spanish-language sequel Bird Box: Barcelona has its moments. They’re all in the first half hour, though. Because it’s a good one, I don’t want to spoil its central trick. In the first act, Barcelona plays on our expectations, then pulls a gotcha that might not be as good as the moment when Janet Leigh takes a shower in Psycho — but it’s still smart. The remaining 90 minutes of the movie? Meh.
Still, it’s better than the Australian psychodrama-with-supernatural-overtones Run Rabbit Run. Late of Succession, Sarah Snook gets to use her native Aussie accent in the role of Sarah, a fertility doctor who’s divorced and raising daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre). When Sarah reminds her ex-husband, now expecting a baby with his new partner, that they agreed Mia would be an only child — plus mentions estrangement with her own mother — the movie tickles us into thinking we’re headed into bad-mom territory. Maybe a Hereditary? Or is it the demon-spawn genre of Orphan or The Omen genre, since Mia can be a spooky brat sometimes? But no, Run turns out to be a slow slog toward a dark secret in Sarah’s past that’s easy to figure out an hour before we’re supposed to. Director Daina Reid and screenwriter Hannah Kent pull a switcheroo like Bird Box: Barcelona. They trick us into thinking we’re about to watch a good, creepy horror flick, then bungle the job.
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MAX: Rock Hudson and Last Call
Two documentaries on Max remind us that, even as conservatives use LGBTQ issues as political footballs to score points in the Stupidity Bowl every election season, things used to be, habitually, worse for gay people.
As a movie star, he was the epitome of American golden boy in a very long career, but Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed reminds us that he probably would have gone to his grave with a big lie if AIDS hadn’t outed him in his final months. There’s a deep and fascinating story to be told about the beefcake actor, but Stephen Kijak’s doc isn’t it. For movie buffs, it’s full of wonderful clips from Hudson’s films, especially the ones he made with Douglas Sirk. And in its final act, it’s not very surprising (for anyone who survived the Reagan years and the administration’s indifference to HIV/AIDS) to learn that, when he was on his deathbed, fellow actors Ronald and Nancy Reagan refused to help their old friend get vital medical care.
Much of Heaven tries to draw buried meanings from Hudson’s screen roles, and his closeted life. This was done first, and better, in Mark Rappaport’s 1992 film Rock Hudson’s Home Movie. The Max film feels like an uncredited ripoff.
Also on Max, the four-episode Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York recounts the 1990s murders of four gay men who were last seen at either of two gay bars in Manhattan. I felt the first episode moved pretty slowly, telling me things I already knew about gay life back then. Then I realized younger people won’t know this history. Collective memory is an ephemeral thing. I got schooled myself watching Last Call, learning for instance that even in the ’90s, decades after the Stonewall riots, the NYPD still treated LGBT New Yorkers as pariahs. It’s a reminder that history does what history likes to do. It pretends to move forward in a straight line but has a way of circling back and repeating itself, for better and for worse.
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PRIME VIDEO: The Horror of Dolores Roach
I was liking The Horror of Dolores Roach . . . until I wasn’t. The engaging Justina Machado — an actor who has the kind of real-life body and pretty-but-not-gorgeous face you don’t see enough of in leading roles — plays Dolores. Emerging from 16 years of prison after taking the fall for a weed-dealing boyfriend, she finds her old neighborhood of Washington Heights gentrified almost beyond recognition, save for the old empanada restaurant she loves.
There she restarts her life, setting up a massage business in a basement apartment and providing fresh meat to the restaurant’s owner, Luis (Alejandro Hernandez), via bodies of clients who piss her off, starting with the landlord (Marc Maron, doing his Marc Maron thing). A Latina, dark-comedy take on Sweeney Todd, only without the music? Why not. Unfortunately, by the end of episode three, the show felt like it was spinning its wheels and taking shortcuts that didn’t make sense. Other viewers may feel like sticking with it longer.
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ODDS AND ENDS
In my spare time, I’m catching up on things in a haphazard way. I’m one episode away from finishing the third and last season of the British cop drama Happy Valley, streaming on various platforms. I’ll be sorry to see the end of Sally Wainwright’s drama starring Sarah Lancashire, Siobhan Finneran and James Norton.
On Hulu, I’m going through the 10 episodes of season two of The Bear with deliberate slowness, savoring each episode like it’s something concocted just for me by chefs Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri). On Netflix, I’m enjoying the enthusiastically stupid magic-and-monsters series The Witcher, now in its third season and the last with Henry Cavill in the title role.
For deeper fare, I’ve been keeping cool this summer with a rewatching marathon of some of the profound “children’s movies” made by the great animator Hayao Miyazaki, available on Max in both their original Japanese and English-dubbed versions. Are there any better movies in the world than My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke? Those are my personal top three.
Miyazaki has directed 10 major features, including the upcoming The Boy and the Heron. His blend of realism and the ethereal is unparalleled. The surface weirdness of the worlds he creates somehow resonate on a submerged, psychological level that children and adults can feel equally. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, whatever your age, I envy you. Happy watching!
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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming column here.
