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Release
date:
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October 2, 2019
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Director:
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Siddharth Anand
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Cast:
Language:
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Hrithik Roshan,
Tiger Shroff, Vaani Kapoor, Ashutosh Rana, Anupriya Goenka, Soni Razdan, Arif
Zakaria
Hindi
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It is a good time
to be a woman Bollywood viewer. No, revise that to woman, man and anyone else
who likes hot-looking dudes. Because we live in an era when we know without
question that if a film stars Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff, then
irrespective of how the screenplay pans out, it will deliver pay-off in the
form of dance jugalbandis between
these two, thrilling physical stunts and at least one of them shedding his
shirt to flash a perfectly worked out torso.
And so it is with War helmed by Siddharth Anand whose
directorial credits include Salaam
Namaste, Ta Ra Rum Pum, Bachna Ae Haseeno, Anjaana Anjaani and Bang Bang.
Dance duet in War featuring the male leads: check. To
the song Jai Jai Shivshankar.
Thrilling stunts:
check. From start to finish.
Shirt removal:
check. At 11.38 a.m. on my watch, during a 9 a.m. show. Yes, I measured the
wait. Plus, if women are your preferred sex, then FYI the first shot of Vaani
Kapoor in the film has her in a two-piece swimsuit. And throughout the young
lady’s scenes, the tailoring department is sparing in its use of fabric for
her.
Don’t judge
me. When you invest time and money in a film, and it turns out to be
deeply problematic, a viewer is compelled to eke out a return on investment.
And if you are going, “Hawww, how can you call yourself a feminist and talk
like that?”, may I request you to click on this hyperlink?
War is in some ways an exciting action thriller
starring Tiger Shroff as Khalid Rahmani, an Army officer
assigned to nab his former mentor, Kabir (Hrithik Roshan), who has
now inexplicably gone rogue. On the road to their final confrontation,
there are high-speed chases, bloody fisticuffs, impossible acrobatics,
impressive gadgets, pretty men and women, stunning locales in Italy, Portugal, Australia,
India and elsewhere, and some well-conceived
twists. One twist can be seen coming from a distance, but the rest are
admittedly unpredictable. One character’s questionable actions seem to have
been completely forgotten in the end, but for the most part the screenplay
remains consistent. Despite War’s
evidently large budget, at least three sequences look plastic and pretending to
have been shot on location, but even this is forgivable because the overall
visual content is breathtaking. My pick of cinematographer Benjamin Jasper’s
frames is a night-time view of a Delhi Metro train whizzing past this city’s famed
giant Hanuman statue – the Metro is now a Bollywood staple but no one has shot
it quite like this yet.
The overall
excitement in the screenplay compensates for these flaws and the inordinately
loud background score, especially if you are in an indulgent mood having
accepted that in most departments War
is conventional Bollywood. This is the sort of film in which Vaani Kapoor’s introduction
comes in a stereotypical song and dance passage highlighting her looks while
Kabir gazes at her, because what else is a heroine for but to be looked at,
loved and provide a motivation for the hero’s actions rather than being herself
in the thick of things? This is the sort of film in which a
rambunctious, colourful song and dance routine on elaborate sets follows right
after an emotionally intense scene because a certain kind of Bollywood cinema
wants to be in a position to tell the viewer that isme action hai, drama hai, comedy hai, emoshun hai, naach-gaana hai aur romance bhi, and narrative rationale be damned. War is the sort of film in
which, right in the middle of a bone-crunching battle amidst ruins in
Tikrit, Kabir and Khalid pause for a spot of dialoguebaazi, which is of
course silly but also amusing in the way commercial Indian films of any
language tend to be when they pointedly ask viewers not to take them
seriously.
All in all then, War could have been a suspenseful,
eyecatching, entertaining ride. But for its politics. Behind the guns, gloss
and glamour, what this film is is a painfully condescending ode to Muslim
loyalty to our vatan, an ode that is
particularly cynical and offensive considering that the past five years have been marked by unprecedented Islamophobia in India.
There was a time
when Hindi cinema was replete with positive stereotypes of Muslims, and liberal
commentators (Muslim and non-Muslim) should be held to account for not pointing
out that excessively syrupy portrayals of a particular community – the golden-hearted
fakir, the golden-hearted tawaif, the golden-hearted all-sacrificing friend or
stranger – was also a form of othering that needed to be called out. They
failed to recognise that glowing stereotypes are very likely
to have been over-compensation for closeted prejudice. The turn of the
century brought in a steady trickle of films in which Muslims were thankfully
portrayed as regular people, good, bad and ugly. But in the past five years, as
open expressions of hatred have become increasingly socially acceptable,
Bollywood has cashed in on prevailing Islamophobia with an equally steady
trickle of tacky, historically dishonest films such as Padmaavat, Kesari and Kalank, or even the more polished but
just as insidious Batla House. War does not fall into the same category
as these four aforementioned films. Weirdly enough, the team of War seems to mean well. But the writing
(story by producer Aditya Chopra and Anand himself, screenplay by
Shridhar Raghavan and Anand) operates on the “unn logon ke beech bhi kuchh achhe log hotey hai” (there are some
good people among them too) attitude that one gets from fence-sitting
majoritarian bigots in the real world.
Messrs Chopra,
Anand and Raghavan, if you think you were doing India’s already beleaguered
Muslim community a good turn with War,
please step back for a moment, take a deep breath, give yourself some distance
from it and maybe, just maybe, you may realise how patronising your film is.
Khalid Rahmani
is the character being put through an agni
pariksha in the film.
Some may argue that the denouement serves the
purpose of holding a mirror up to a cynical audience, reminding viewers of
their own prejudice. It does not work that way though because the film itself
reeks of a loyalty test.
Hrithik Roshan is
the film’s greatest asset. He is gorgeous, the salt and pepper look suits his
gracefully aging face beautifully, and despite occasional over-wrought
emotional histrionics he does a decent acting job. But the nasal, throaty dialogue
delivery that has been his signature so far is so overdone here that it is
sometimes hard to decipher the lines he speaks.
Tiger Shroff is an
excellent dancer, has a fabulous body and an overall likeable screen presence,
but acting is not his talent. In a film where he spends most of his time
bashing up people, that might have been tolerable if it were not for
his laboured attempt at pronouncing Urdu words. What was the diction coach
doing?
Vaani Kapoor has a
limited role but her Naina gets one of the film’s most promising lines. Words
to this effect: “Not every Indian is a soldier, not every Indian is out to save
the country. Some of us are just fighting to give our little child a simple,
good life. These are the battles being fought by ordinary Indians.” Kapoor is
effective to the extent that she can be in a small role, but Naina’s
proposition remains unexplored.
All the film’s
pluses and minuses fade into the background though in the face of its
(unwittingly?) troubling politics. Khalid is a metaphor for India’s Muslim
community, and when one person at one point offers what he sees as proof of the
young man’s patriotism followed by “Isse
bada saboot kya ho sakta hai uski vatanparasti ka?” (What greater proof can
there be of his devotion to the nation?), the condescension just shoots through
the roof.
“The war is still
on,” says a character in the closing moments. Take his word for it:
there will be a sequel. Next time, Team War, stick with the mindlessness and skip the misplaced, poorly
thought out profundities, please?
Rating (out
of five stars): **
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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156 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
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