Do keep in mind that this isn't a big budget Hollywood production. It was a made for TV movie intended to give a couple of hours of entertainment while you sit on the couch watching the tube in the days before Netflix and Amazon, etc. It needs to be judged by that standard. And looked at it in that way, it's passable. It's reasonably suspenseful, although not especially original. It's another hijack movie that depends on all sorts of things: somehow the prisoner being escorted on a commercial flight managed to get word out to his accomplices of exactly which flight he was going to be on. And it depends on the FBI agents guarding him being complete dunces who seem far too easily overcome. But you have to accept all that or you won't have a movie. Somehow the hijackers have to take over the plane, after all. So - OK. I thought the performances here were just a little bit bland - there seemed to be surprisingly little emotion from those portraying the passengers, who you'd think would be a little more panicky at the presence of three hijackers, all of whom have guns and one of whom has a bomb? But there's intrigue in how this is all going to play out that was sufficiently interesting to keep me watching.
Now, I've found that every TV movie of this type has some sort of sub-theme going on. Here, there were a whole lot of variations on what you might call the complexities of male-female relationships. One of the passengers has a tense relationship with his wife. The head FBI agent on the ground has a complicated relationship with the female hostage negotiator. The leader of the hijackers has his lover among his accomplices, and she's a little too kind for his tastes every now and then. The female pilot and male co-pilot of the plane are former lovers who find sharing the cockpit a bit awkward. There was just a lot of this - and it was very noticeable and even a little bit funny.
I didn't find this to be a bad movie; I didn't feel at all as if I had wasted my time by watching it. (6/10)
