It’s Kill List summer, baby
Idris Elba may lend Apple TV’s gripping new series Hijack star power, but his co-star, Neil Maskell, is the one who grabs the premise by the throat. As the lead terrorist hijacking a flight from Dubai to London, the scruffy British actor barks orders, jerks passengers around, and sweats profusely as things don’t exactly go according to plan. Any actor can perform ticking-clock drama, but few have the goods to let the weight of a situation completely crush their psyche. Rage, confusion, spiraling crisis — this is the Maskell special.
The creative team behind Hijack clearly watched him in Kill List, one of the all-time great horror-thrillers that’s having an unexpected moment… that only people in the Kill List hive would possibly notice. But you want to be in the Kill List hive.
Maskell has been all over British TV in the last decade, playing gruff cops, gruff robbers, and even gruff Winston Churchill on Peaky Blinders. But the apex of his particular raw energy, the kind that Hijack confines to a jet’s suffocating cabins so that Elba’s master negotiator character can worm his way into the hijack plans, is in Kill List. In the 2011 film, the actor plays Jay, a tortured hitman recruited for a series of missions that lead him into dizzying, cult-ish conspiracies. Stricken with wartime PTSD but swimming in bills, Jay can’t say no to the lethal missions issued to him by shadowy employers, but every kill seems to shatter him even more. Maskell’s blowups on Hijack can feel explosive thanks to the page-turner construction of the story, but in Kill List — where violence and Blair Witch-esque mythology give Jay’s descent an eldritch quality — his performance is downright ballistic. It’s ugly. It’s great!
Kill List is the nightmare
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