At the end of “Live Free or Die Hard,” Bruce Willis’ fourth outing as NYPD officer John McClane, Timothy Olyphant’s Big Bad tells our hero, “On your tombstone, it should read, ‘Always in the wrong place at the wrong time.’” By itself, it’s not a bad line, and as a set-up for McClane’s retort — “How about ‘yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker’?” — it’s even better. But it’s not exactly accurate. Yes, our dear friend John had a couple of rough Christmases: first when terrorists took over his wife’s office shortly after he stopped by Nakatomi Plaza to see her, and then again two years later, when mercenaries invaded Dulles International Airport as Holly was about to return the favor by visiting her hubby on the East Coast.
But in “Die Hard with a Vengeance,” John was at home nursing a hangover when the hostage-taker calls him. He was in the right place at the right time — unless you want to argue that had he not been home, he may have avoided wearing a racist misanthropic sandwich board in the middle of Harlem. Of course, then he would’ve never met Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson), and Simon (Jeremy Irons) would’ve found another place and time to torture him anyway, so all things considered, where he was worked out pretty well.
The point being: After repeating the same implausible premise once already, director John McTiernan and writer Jonathan Hensleigh knew better than to ask the audience to swallow yet another huge coincidence. So for his third outing, the wrong place at the wrong time found John.
Credit to “Hijack” co-creator, executive producer, and director Jim Field Smith for giving the same grace to his own reluctant hero, Sam Nelson (Idris Elba), even if it means facing further accusations of stealing from — with apologies to “Sin City,” “RED,” “The Expendables,” and something called “Detective Knight” — Bruce Willis’ best action franchise.
Yes, Season 1 of the Apple TV series borrows heavily from “Die Hard,” where one exhausted, off-duty expert is forced into duty by thieves posing as terrorists (sound familiar?). But the challenge facing Season 2 wasn’t how to reinvent the wheel. It was, “How do we repeat the formula without abandoning even the lowest-level of action-movie logic?”
While guarding “Hijack” Season 2’s many twists, it’s safe to say Sam expects the danger waiting when he boards what appears to be one of Berlin’s regular ol’ weekday-morning subway trains. Standing stoically in the terminal, amid the rush-hour hustle and bustle, the depressed corporate-business negotiator is noticeably nervous. He takes his time walking through the station, like a weary commuter hoping to be sent home early. He orders a can of soda from a vending machine and then throws it away, unopened. He thinks long and hard before slipping through the train’s closing doors.
But, of course, he does. He has to. For “Hijack” to work, Sam needs to be on the ride when things go haywire. So he is and, as they do, Season 2 rolls along smoothly enough for a few episodes, sliding between the above-ground authorities trying to figure out what’s going on with Sam’s runaway train and the underground passengers trying to figure out why their ride is plagued with more unscheduled stops than the Manhattan B-train.
With no less than seven subplots running concurrently, “Hijack” is never stagnant, and it stockpiles dependable cliches like the conductors of yesteryear would stockpile coal. There’s the rookie transit worker (Lisa Vicari) who picked a bad day to volunteer for overtime. There’s the nervous train operator (Christian Näthe) with an odd sense of loyalty toward a job he’s already betrayed. There’s Sam’s ex-wife, Marsha (Christine Adams), who’s taking some personal time at a remote cabin in the woods. There’s Marsha’s husband, Daniel (Max Beesley), who’s just hanging around, waiting to put his British badge to good use. There are suspicious passengers, suspicious government officials, and suspicious strangers everywhere.
Sadly, Season 2 doesn’t know what to do with most of them. Each 40-ish minute episode following the premiere delivers diminishing returns, Elba can only beg people to listen to him so many times before growing monotonous, and when the train creeps to a polite stop at its final destination, there’s little suspense to the resolution and even less sense.
At first, “Hijack” Season 2 seems intent on proving it has a sustainable premise; that a semi-regular bloke like Sam can wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time, season after season, on as many planes, trains, and automobiles as Apple deems necessary. But like a subway car diverted without warning, Season 2 soon loses its sense of direction and erases any hope of arriving at the promised destination.
Part of what sells the “Die Hard” sequels (at least Nos. 2-4 — we shan’t speak of the wretched fifth film) is simple: Bruce Willis. But “Live Free or Die Hard” has a smarmy villain, solid set-pieces, and clever-enough plotting. “With a Vengeance” (the best of them) pairs Willis with Jackson — a perfect, chatty foil for McClane’s taciturn grump — before sending them on an aptly grimy puzzle-solving tour of ’90s New York City. (And Irons makes for another great villain.) Even “Die Harder” manages solid fireworks in its final sequence, after applying a few clever twists to the original’s playbook.
Despite Elba’s surprise Emmy nomination, “Hijack” is not an ambitious series. And yet Season 2 still isn’t ambitious enough. It doesn’t do the work to magnify Elba’s charisma, utilize its subway setting, or design a payoff worth the time it takes to get there. (At roughly five-and-a-half hours, it would be easy to cut the runtime in half, thus fulfilling “Hijack’s” spiritual destiny as a passable plane movie.) Getting Sam Nelson back in the wrong place at the wrong time may have seemed like the story’s biggest challenge, but — much like the silly first season — the logistics wouldn’t have mattered if the rest felt right.
Grade: C
“Hijack” Season 2 premieres Wednesday, July 14 on Apple TV. New episodes will be released weekly through the finale (Episode 8) on March 4.
