Director: Timo Vuorensola
97 Minutes turns a hijacked airliner's fuel gauge into the film's literal countdown clock.
What is 97 Minutes about?
A commercial flight is seized mid-air, and officials on the ground calculate that the plane has only ninety-seven minutes of fuel left before it goes down wherever it happens to be. NSA Director Hawkins wants to shoot the aircraft out of the sky before it can reach a populated target, while Deputy Toyin pushes back, convinced there's still a way to save the passengers. On board, one of the men behind the hijacking may not be who the others think he is, working an angle that could change everything if he survives long enough to use it. The film moves between the cockpit, the cabin, and the crisis room on the ground, letting the clock itself supply most of the tension.
Cast & crew
Jonathan Rhys Meyers takes the central role among the hijackers, with Alec Baldwin and MyAnna Buring anchoring the ground-side crisis team as Hawkins and Toyin, whose disagreement over how to handle the plane drives much of the film's back half. Director Timo Vuorensola keeps the ensemble moving between three tightly cut locations rather than settling on one.
Context & significance
97 Minutes belongs to the real-time aviation-thriller lineage that stretches back through decades of hijacking and disaster films, compressing its entire plot into the runtime suggested by the title itself. Shot as a co-production spanning Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, it leans on that tradition's familiar pressure points, a fuel gauge, a chain of command, a passenger cabin, rather than reinventing the format.
Where & how to watch
97 Minutes is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing, so the cockpit and crisis-room dialogue plays entirely in Farsi for viewers who prefer it. This page can be read by anyone at no cost, and streaming the film itself only requires logging into a K-Time account, with a Farsi interface available throughout the platform.