The Fourth Angel

The Fourth Angel is a 2001 British-Canadian thriller film directed by John Irvin and starring Jeremy Irons, Forest Whitaker, Jason Priestley and Charlotte Rampling. It was written by Allan Scott, from a homonymous novel by Robin Neillands (writing under the name Robin Hunter). Irons portrays a man who seeks justice after a terrorist attack on the plane in which his family was travelling. The film takes its title from Revelation 16:8: "The fourth angel poured out his bowl upon the sun, and it was given to him to scorch men with fire".

Jack Elgin (Jeremy Irons) is the European editor of The Economist, a magazine based in London, England. Jack has a wife, Maria (Briony Glassco), and three kids, Joanne (Anna Maguire), Julia (Holly Boyd), and Andrew (Joel Pitts). Jack subtly hijacks the family vacation, changing it from a lazy week of Mediterranean fun and sun in Corfu, Greece, to a tour of India, because of a story he has to cover. Maria is not as impressed as the kids are.

Jack himself envisioned a chance to simultaneously seize a plum reporting assignment and spend at least a smidgen of quality time with his family. But, on the way to India, their plane, a Boeing 747-200 owned by AM Air, an American airline, makes an unscheduled stopover in Limassol, Cyprus, because of a mechanical problem. After a while of waiting inside the Limassol airport, everyone gets back on the plane—which is then hijacked by a group of terrorists known as the August 15th Movement, led by a Serbian man named Ivanic Loyvek (Serge Soric) and his right-hand man Karadan Maldic (Ivan Marevich). And they are demanding $50,000,000 from the U.S. State Department in one hour or everyone on the airplane will die.