Hijacked

Released By: Anchor Bay
Availability: Out 30th July
Price: £15.99 (DVD), £19.99 (Blu-ray)

Low budget, direct to DVD/Blu-ray movies rarely come close to challenging their big money cousins from Hollywood. However, seeing that the cast included Vinnie Jones, Dominic Purcell and Randy Couture I was hoping that Hijacked would prove itself to be an enjoyable action jaunt. Oh how I was wrong.

First some plot background. Couture, most recognisable to fans of mixed martial arts before making his move to acting as one of the Expendables plays CIA Agent Paul Ross who, along with MI6 counterpart Joe Ballard (Vinnie Jones), is on the trail of a criminal organisation known as The Tribe. He is the typical good guy determined to bring down the bad guys to the point of obsession leading to the break up with his ex-fiancee Liv, although there is no evidence he has descended into the murky, cliched world of alcoholism yet. Following a bungled operation that leads to the death of some of Ross’s fellow agents including his friend Ballard, he gets some intel that billionaire businessman Bruce Lieb (Craig Fairbrass) is The Tribe’s next target. Lieb is about to leave for DC on his swanky private 747 and dismisses Ross’s warnings out of hand. Ross is happy to leave it at that until he discovers Liv, having just been employed by Lieb, is on the flight too. Good job too, or this movie would have been over before it even began.

So here we are sat on the tarmac getting ready to take off into an hour of all out action in a very confined space, right? Wrong. The action scenes are few and far between with a couple of good old fashioned close quarters punch ups, some cold blood executions and a sporadic helping of shoot outs. In between these sequences our film’s stars try their hand at acting, something they don’t seem very good at. Jones, for the 5 minutes he is actually in the film, and Couture deliver their lines methodically and in unspectacular fashion while Purcell, cunningly disguised behind a porn star ‘tache, is reduced to a few lines mainly involving the use of the word “mate” (just in case you couldn’t figure he was supposed to be Australian).

What is totally unforgivable is how stupid they have made the good guys. Seriously, Johnny English would have been proud of them. Unfortunately he was like that for comedic effect whereas in Hijacked they just don’t have that excuse. Having been trained by the CIA and special forces respectively, you would think Ross and Otto would know better than to just knock down the bad guys, walk away and leave them to dust themselves off to come at them once more. Untying one and then leaving her to her own devices is so far beyond stupid I wanted to turn it off there and then! Seriously, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Predictable plot twists, poorly formed characters, and actors in roles that don’t suit them is never going to be a winning formula. Unfortunately Hijacked has put them all together to create one giant mess.

2/10