REVIEW 792: FIGHTER

Release date:	January 25, 2024
Director:	Siddharth Anand
Cast:	Hrithik Roshan, Deepika Padukone, Anil Kapoor, Karan Singh Grover, Akshay Oberoi, Ashutosh Rana
Language:	Hindi

 

“PoK ka matlab hai Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. Tumne occupy kiya hai. Maalik hum hai (PoK stands for Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. You have occupied it. But we are the actual owners),” says Hrithik Roshan’s character in the midst of raging fisticuffs with a Pakistani terrorist in the new Hindi film Fighter. 

 

For the record, the dictionary defines maalik as: owner, master, lord, proprietor, husband. In the subtitles given in the trailer, the producers opt for “owner”. 

 

“We are the actual owners.” Never before has a Hindi film spelt out its proprietorial attitude towards Kashmir in such black-and-white terms.

 

Director Siddharth Anand’s Fighter – based on a story by Anand and Ramon Chhib, with a  screenplay by Chhib and dialogues by Hussain Dalal and Abbas Dalal – pretends to be a romance, the saga of an Indian Air Force (IAF) officer whose over-confidence cost him the life of someone dear to him as a result of which he denies himself the right to love and be loved again. Behind that emotive, humane camouflage though, Fighter is just another loud, jingoistic affair in which India and Pakistan battle over Kashmir while the voices of Kashmiris are entirely erased. 

 

That’s precisely what 2023’s Shah Rukh Khan starrer Pathaan (2023) did too, so what’s new with Fighter, you may ask? 

 

Not very much. For one, this abhorrent line on ownership in Fighter is delivered by an A-list star who has not overtly aligned himself with BJP-RSS off screen in the way so many of his Hindi film colleagues have. Pathaan played it safer on this front, to create the false impression of being a progressive film (read my review here) although it was just old wine in a bottle of deceptive dialogues, insidious and intentional ambiguity about the religious identity of the protagonist and the primary antagonist, cleverly disguised pandering to majoritarian sentiments and SRK’s charm. 

 

Second, Fighter is pegged on actual news developments: the suicide bombing in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district in 2019 that killed 40 members of the Central Reserve Police (CRPF), and the IAF’s retaliatory air strike on an alleged terrorist training camp in Balakot, Pakistan.

 

In tenor and spirit nevertheless, Fighter really does feel like Pathaan 2, while Pathaan itself felt like War 2. That Pathaanand War (2019) were also directed by Anand is no coincidence. Reminder: Roshan was the co-lead in War, which might have been nothing more than a noisy, slick action flick if it weren’t for its condescension towards the Muslim patriot played by Tiger Shroff.

 

In Fighter, Roshan is Shamsher Pathania a.k.a. Patty, an ace fighter pilot who is in the bad books of his boss (Anil Kapoor). The latter believes Patty is prone to prioritising personal glory over the interests of his team. Patty is part of a crack team of IAF pilots that includes Minal Rathore (Deepika Padukone) a.k.a. Mini. Obviously these two are drawn together like magnet to metal, but Patty’s past keeps him from openly expressing his feelings for her. 

 

In Chapter 1 we get hackneyed introductory scenes stressing Roshan’s sexiness in a white towel and in pilot’s uniform, and Padukone’s sexiness in uniform, followed by extensive passages of bonhomie between all the members of Patty and Mini’s team. There’s light-hearted teasing, songs, a couple gazing at each other across a space filled with people while music plays in the background, incremental revelations about the enigmatic hero’s painful back story that, as it turns out, lacks novelty, and other familiar elements that are often used in Indian films to superficially establish a sense of fraternity and a pivotal romance. In the background is the Pakistan government and a deadly terrorist – a snarling chap with a bloody red eye called Azhar Akhtar (Rishabh Sawhney) – who they recruit to target Kashmir.

 

Chapter 2 deals with Pulwama and Balakot. 

 

Despite the hyperbolic cartoonishness of Azhar Akhtar and the blatant cover-up that Fighter pulls off on behalf of the Indian government in Pulwama, despite the surfeit of clichés and decibels, the film until this point is carried on the shoulders of Roshan’s good looks, the sparks between him and Padukone, Satchith Paulose’s exquisite cinematography in stunning locales, the adrenaline high that comes from watching pilots in combat in skilfully executed action scenes and the sadness of knowing that those CRPF jawans were indeed murdered in real life. 

 

None of this is enough though to save Chapter 3 from its deafening volume, silliness, unoriginal storytelling, formulaic characterisation, inexorable length and the lies that begin in Chapter 2. 

 

First let’s deal with the cover-up. When the Pulwama terror strike occurred, corporate-owned news media largely avoided asking the obvious questions raised by the public on social media and some experts regarding the massive intelligence failure involved. Many have even ignored the statements by Satyapal Malik who was Jammu and Kashmir’s governor at the time of the Pulwama attack – Malik has said at multiple forums that the attack resulted from the “incompetence” of the Indian establishment, the Union Home Ministry in particular, and the CRPF, while also calling out the Prime Minister himself for his response. 

 

Obviously, Fighter does not have the guts to show any of this. Like every government-pleasing Hindi film since 2014, Fighter is disinterested in introspection, fixated on chest-thumping and backs the position that all acts of courage and all innovation in India have been initiated in the past 10 years. Mirroring the bombast of Uri: The Surgical Strike’s “Hindustan ab chup nahi baithega. Yeh naya Hindustan hai. Yeh ghar mein ghusega bhi, aur maarega bhi (India will no longer remain silent. This is a new India – it will not only enter your house, but it will kill you there),” in Fighter we get a politician, one assumes the PM, surveying the coffins of dead CRPF jawans and saying: “Picchle pachaas saalon mein kisi sarkar ne unki inn harkaton ka muh-thod jawaab nahin diya. Lekin ab bas. Unhe dikhana padega ke baap kaun hai (For the past 50 years, no government has given them a befitting reply. But now…enough. It’s time to show them who’s the boss).” 

 

Fighter kills whatever emotional resonance it had until the Balakot episode by following it up with endless screaming, ridiculously conceived confrontations between the IAF and Pakistani terrorists, and dialoguebaazi that peaks with the “maalik hum hai” line and Patty yelling a threat at the top of his voice that India will turn Pakistan into – wait for it, it’s every aggressive nationalist’s wet dream – “India Occupied Pakistan”. It’s not that Hindi filmdom is incapable of delivering credible battlefield sequences involving India and Pakistan. For a recent example within the commercial Hindi space, refer to Vishnu Varadhan’s Shershaah starring Siddharth Malhotra. 

 

In this segment, the sole Muslim on Patty and Mini’s team, Basheer Khan (Akshay Oberoi), has that inevitable conversation about Islam with a terrorist that has by now been made mandatory for loyal-to-the-vatan Muslims in propagandist Hindi films. 

 

And in the end, Fighter trivialises itself with a steaming hot song ‘n’ dance by the sea that has zero connect with the flavour of the rest of the narrative. Yes of course all those body-baring outfits on Roshan and Padukone are titillating, but the entire package is too imitative to be impactful and is anyway terribly out of place in a film in which it was preceded by bloodshed, a beloved character’s mutilated body and immeasurable heartbreak. In fact, the inclusion of this song, Ishq Jaisa Kuchh, indicates a lack of commitment on the part of the filmmaker to his chosen theme. 

 

Like the entire ensemble cast, Roshan’s acting in Fighter is as okay as it can be in such a film, barring a scene in which, while shouting something like “Main aa raha hoon” in a life-and-death situation, he adopts a trademark tone reminiscent of his character in Koi... Mil Gaya – a tone that few directors have managed to completely control in his dialogue delivery. 

 

Padukone does better but make no mistake about this: she plays an ordinarily written supporting character who ultimately amounts to little more than the leading man’s romantic sidekick and sensual drapery, in a film designed as a showcase for Roshan. 

 

Uri was dangerous because it peddled its agenda with a blend of originality, finesse and craft. War, Pathaan and Fighter are recycled versions of each other and of the entire multitude of war-mongering deshbhakt films of the present era. Fighter actually has some good things going for it to begin with, but gradually squanders those positives by resorting to lazy storytelling to fulfil its agenda. Yawn.

 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 2   

 

Running time:

167 minutes

 

Visuals courtesy: IMDB 

REVIEW 734: WAR

Release date:	October 2, 2019
Director:	Siddharth Anand
Cast: Language:	Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff, Vaani Kapoor, Ashutosh Rana, Anupriya Goenka, Soni Razdan, Arif Zakaria Hindi

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): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	156 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/war-movie-review-hrithik-tiger-starrer-runs-a-loyalty-test-for-muslims-under-cover-of-an-exciting-action-drama-7440501.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_(2019_film)

REVIEW 713: SUPER 30

Release date:	July 12, 2019
Director:	Vikas Bahl
Cast: Language:	Hrithik Roshan, Mrunal Thakur, Pankaj Tripathi, Sadhana Singh, Virendra Saxena, Aditya Srivastava, Vijay Verma, Amit Sadh Hindi

From a Hindi film industry that has for decades now barely acknowledged the existence of India’s caste system, it is quite something to see two films rooted in caste discrimination – Article 15 and Super 30 – within a span of a fortnight. Let us take a minute to celebrate that change.

The question now is this: should we be so grateful to artists who bring up issues rarely visited by their colleagues that we let their faux pas, prejudices, poor research and poor storytelling pass? Or do we call them out on their follies in the hope that they are genuinely invested in their chosen themes, and will try to do better next time?

The answer is: say it like it is. Of course a star as major and glamorous as Hrithik Roshan opting to play a character from a lower caste is a turning point in this insular industry which has long assumed, as it once did about women protagonists, that heroes from marginalised communities can only yield tragic weepy tales that have no place in the mainstream. What is lovelier still is that Super 30 is based on the uplifting story of a real-life achiever. That it comes to us at a time when any critique of caste is slammed as being “Hinduphobic” makes it courageous too.

No doubt these are laudable starting blocks. But Super 30 dilutes itself in multiple ways. First, the brown makeup used on Roshan for the role of Anand Kumar signals a stereotypical understanding of what it means to be lower caste, offering us Hindi cinema’s caste equivalent of the white Western world’s brownface. “He doesn’t look Dalit” was a criticism levelled at Prakash Jha for casting Saif Ali Khan as a Dalit in Aarakshan. Those pointing fingers should have told us what that “look” is since Dalit is not a race or ethnicity but a pan-India social categorisation signifying extreme ostracism and a forced adherence to certain professions. If Team Super 30 was indeed convinced that Hrithik’s light complexion would never be found on a member of a lower caste, it is worth asking why they did not go in search of a dark-skinned actor instead of bottles of brown make-up, because the caking up of a well-known face is distracting, to say the least. And if their argument is that all they wanted was for Roshan to resemble the man he is playing as closely as possible, well then, videos and photographs of the real Anand Kumar will tell you that he looks nothing like the Bollywood hottie with or without makeup, so that claim does not hold water.

Second, while Super 30 is gutsy off and on with its caste references, it is also simultaneously hesitant in addition to betraying a limited understanding of this deeply entrenched social dynamic.

So, bravo for showing a character from a dominant group proclaim in Anand Kumar’s presence that social divides are written into ancient scriptures and epics, since this is in truth how upper castes continue to justify their claims to supremacy (the Censor Board forced the producer to dub over the word “Ramayan” in that scene, and what we hear is the person saying “Rajpuraan”). Bravo for having a poor, lower-caste postman tell a post-office employee named Trivedi to quit his fossilised thinking and realise that we live in an age when talent, not heredity, will determine who rules. Bravo for the poor man who describes an inconsiderate medico as a “donation-waala doctor”, because those opposed to SC/ST reservations use “quota-waala” as an epithet and claim that meritocracy is their only concern but do not raise similar objections to academic institutions in which privileged classes can buy admission. Bravo.

(Applause fades) There is no explanation though for why Anand’s caste is never specified in the film but only implied through conversations in more than one scene. It remains the elephant in the room whose presence has been alluded to but not stated in black and white. That Which Must Not Be Named. But why?

Writer Sanjeev Dutta also confuses class with caste when he shows the snobbery of Anand’s upper-caste girlfriend’s father melt away as soon as the boy starts making big money. The point about caste is its permanence, the fact that you cannot rise up a ladder and shrug off the label that was pasted on you at birth even if you exit poverty and illiteracy through hard work. Considering that the Dad had already had a conversation with Anand in which he condescendingly referred to “your people”, it seems unlikely that this man would forget his contempt overnight because that is not what we see happening in the real India.

Super 30 is based on the life of mathematician-educationist Anand Kumar from Bihar. This is a highly fictionalised account, as you will gather if you read media reports about Kumar starting from the 2000s. It is also an account that steers clear of all question marks raised in the media about Kumar, but since those question marks themselves are murky and require a thorough investigation by an unbiased reporter on the ground, I am not going into a comparison between the film and reality.

Roughly speaking, Anand in the film, like the real guy, is a mathematical genius whose academic brilliance gets him admission in Cambridge University. His impoverished family cannot raise the funds to send him there though. A chain of circumstances leads Anand to a coaching institute for IIT JEE aspirants where he becomes a star teacher and starts raking in good money. However, he decides one day to give up his increasingly comfortable life and set up a free coaching school for under-privileged children where he will train 30 chosen ones for the IIT entrance exam each year, providing them with food and a house for an entire year as he trains them. He calls it Super 30. This leads to a clash between Anand and powerful players in the state’s coaching institute racket.

With all its problems, there is a certain poignance to the account of Anand’s early life as we witness the love within his family despite their financial struggles, the endearing flirtations between his father and mother, his father’s wisdom and mother’s joyousness, and the malice of those who claim to care about the downtrodden but in fact only care for their votes.

After Anand launches Super 30 though, the storytelling becomes as uneven as the film’s understanding of caste, getting downright lacklustre in large portions. The director seems to lose his grip on the narrative as it rolls along, and it does not help that Roshan’s performance is patchy at best. This is not even counting the fact that at 45, the actor is playing a character who is in his teens at the start of this film and in his 20s through most of the rest of it. This is also not counting the fact that Anand in the late 1990s is styled to look like a character out of a K.L. Saigal movie.

Few Bollywood stars can summon up pain in their eyes as Roshan can, but there is a tone and mannerism he used in his performance as a mentally challenged youth in Koi Mil Gaya (2003) that creeps into his dialogue delivery and occasionally even his facial expressions here in Super 30 too. It is a tone he has dipped into each time he has been called to portray simplicity in his career – in earlier roles it usually came up just in passing and was therefore tolerable, but it is hard to ignore in this film in which simplicity is the cornerstone of his character.

Hrithik Roshan is a gorgeous looking man but he has always needed a firm directorial hand to guide him. His Dad Rakesh Roshan, Khalid Mohamed (Fiza), Karan Johar (K3G), Ashutosh Gowariker (Jodhaa Akbar) and Zoya Akhtar (Luck By Chance, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara) have brought out the very best in him. Vikas Bahl has not.

The supporting cast of Super 30 is better. Mrunal Thakur, who was excellent in Tabrez Noorani’s Love Sonia last year, is given little to do as Anand’s girlfriend here, but she pulls off that little well. The child actors are saddled with unmemorable characters that have no depth or expanse, but show flashes of how good they might be in better written roles. Aditya Srivastava is solid as Anand’s unscrupulous professional rival. Sadhana Singh and Virendra Saxena are absolute darlings as Anand’s parents. And Pankaj Tripathi as a corrupt politician manages to be both hilarious and menacing at the same time.

Once the script and direction of Super 30 begin to wander all over the place, there is no turning back. For a start, no one on the team seems to have stopped to ask how Anand intended to sustain Super 30 after exhausting his savings. The real Anand Kumar runs a parallel coaching centre from which he earns high fees that he then pumps into his classes for the poor, but there is no mention of it here nor of any other source of income, perhaps because that coaching centre has been a subject of some controversy. The director’s lax grip on the reins screams out most in the scene featuring the children singing the song Basanti No Dance that was clearly designed to be moving but is curiously emotionally cold.

Ajay-Atul’s music deserved a sturdier platform. As things stand, it is one of the best things about Super 30. Basanti No Dance and Question Mark have an attractive beat and rhythm. Jugraafiya, with its lyrics by the inimitable Amitabh Bhattacharya, is entertaining. And the end credits roll on a haunting melody titled Niyam Ho.

Super 30 comes across as a project that someone somewhere lost interest in at some point and then it all came apart. What else but casualness can explain the misspelling of the production house’s own name in the final credits?

Director Vikas Bahl’s Super 30 comes to theatres in the shadow of an allegation of sexual violence against him that emerged in October 2018 in the wake of the Me Too movement in Bollywood. Bahl’s decline as a filmmaker began long before Me Too though with the release of the boring as hell Shaandaar starring Alia Bhatt and Shahid Kapoor in 2015. It is hard to imagine that the man who made the fabulous Queen (2014) starring Kangana Ranaut also made Shaandaar. Frankly, with all its failings, Super 30 is a qualitative step up for him.

Bahl’s new film is not insufferable and soporific like Shaandaar, but it is misleading to mention it in the same breath as Anubhav Sinha’s Article 15, as I did in the first paragraph of this review, without a clarification. Article 15 is a deeply affecting study of a police officer whose caste privilege has given him the luxury of growing up ignorant about caste until it is rubbed in his face in his adulthood, at which point he sets out to educate himself through interactions with his colleagues and a Dalit activist. Caste should have been omnipresent in Super 30 but by the film’s second half has become almost an aside while the good folk battle conventional Bollywood villains. Someone somewhere gave up on Super 30 a while back, and it shows.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	154 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/super-30-movie-review-hrithiks-uneven-acting-patchy-storytelling-and-a-narrow-take-on-caste-dilute-a-gutsy-theme-6976391.html

Visuals courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/Super30Film/