Fighter – Bail Out!

Fighter

When you’re a dull person in the way I am – with my inter-War-era interests, antiquated habits, and a hairstyle that has been tampered with twice in the last twenty-one years (one of those instances being the evidence I have contesting my mother’s knowledge of hairdos – she has yet to explain just how a hairstyle that resembled an open-face helmet was good-looking) – you look forward to the interesting bits of life. In my case, films are often said interesting bits. And then, occasionally, one runs into a Fighter, a production that is utterly jaw-dropping for the ambition of its scale and just as unmemorable, to the point that as I exited the theatre, I tried to make sense of how to approach writing about the film. What did I think of it? Blank. A tad disconcerted, I thought hard about what I could recall about it. Unsettling though it is to have forgotten most of a film that clocked close to three hours before hitting the quarter-century mark, I made my peace with my lack of recollections fairly easily. Probably because I knew what the film had made me feel: completely and utterly bored.

Siddharth Anand [War], whose Pathaan I quite enjoyed for how much of it was a play on Shah Rukh Khan’s legacy, fashions Fighter as a tribute too, the objects being the Indian Air Force and Paramount’s Top Gun films. Since the mid-80s, when Tony Scott’s film (which I don’t care for) with the brash USN pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell released, most military aviation actioners have had to compete with it, and Joseph Kosinski’s 2022 sequel has only raised the bar further. To his credit, Anand has not concealed the Top Gun connection, and a fair deal of his film is a deviation, though the most obvious inspiration from the American film is the protagonist.

Hrithik Roshan [Lakshya, Dhoom: 2] has to be tired of the Tom Cruise comparisons, what with starring in Bang Bang [Anand, 2014; based on the 2010 Cruise vehicle Knight and Day] and War (which riffed on the long-running Mission: Impossible franchise in multiple ways). Playing a careless “young” fighter pilot who is more concerned with the adrenaline rush of his job than the actualities of it is hardly the sort of thing that’ll help him avoid comparisons with Cruise.

Fighter is set in the early months of 2019 and follows a “Quick Response” mixed IAF squadron – Air Dragons (wondering which dragons Anand has encountered on or under the surface) – commanded by Gp. Capt. Rakesh Jaisingh [Anil Kapoor – Mr. India, JugJugg Jeeyo] that is tasked with tackling any sort of threat the Pakistan Air Force might pose. The creation of a mixed squadron – the likes of which don’t really exist – allows the IAF to show off some of the slick assets it possesses: Roshan, Kapoor, Akshay Oberoi [Kaalakaandi] and Karan Singh Grover [Hate Story 3] all jump into Sukhoi Su-30 MKIs, and Sqn. Ldr. Minal Rathore [Deepika Padukone – Padmaavat, Gehraiyaan, who I took so long to mention because, like Anand, I briefly forgot that she’s in the film] pilots a HAL-manufactured Dhruv helicopter.

The fidayeen attack on a CRPF convoy in Pulwama on 14^th February 2019 that killed forty personnel serves as Fighter‘s inciting incident: there is ruffian speak by a man who talks about showing Pakistan who the “baap” is (though I’m quite certain that’s the crass way of most of our politicians), heightened emotions burst out of the Air Dragons (who obviously waved at the same convoy mere hours ago), and preparations are made to retaliate at a Jaish-e-Mohammed launch pad in Balakot. And this is where Fighter lost me because I’m fed up with Hindi cinema piggybacking off tragedies like Pulwama and the 2016 Uri Brigade attack to tell these lavish blockbuster tales of badla and whatnot. That it is disrespectful is one element of the problem; the other is that the retaliation is always framed as an achievement of some kind, but one can hardly blame filmmakers like Anand for not wanting to probe problem areas when the Government of India is doing the exact same thing.

Any fun that could’ve been derived from Fighter is gone once the Pulwama attack has taken place, and the film sheds any lightness it may have carried for weightier loads, the kind it doesn’t have either the narrative heft or the intelligence to sell well. The use of a real-life event, which is what Fighter‘s makers are clearly hoping will bring people into theatres (aside from Roshan and Padukone) becomes its Achilles heel: the film has to tread with caution because the attack and the loss of life is real, and Anand has never been a filmmaker to handle that stuff particularly well – the emo tracks of Bang Bang and War are their worst elements, there’s a reason people don’t look back kindly on Ta Ra Rum Pum [2007] and Anjaana Anjaani [2010].

Worse still is the ham-fisted writing. With as many as five writers – three for dialogue [Hussain Dalal – Kalank, Brahmastra: Part One, Abbas Dalal – Baagi 2, Fanney Khan, Biswapati Sarkar – Jaadugar, Kaala Paani], one for screenplay [Ramon Chibb, also producer], and two for story [Chibb and Anand] – there should be some semblance of originality or at least an attempt to fashion a new bottle for this old, bland wine, but no, the staples are all the same, from gooey-eyed glances to a simmering Commanding Officer to stereotypes: Sqn. Ldr. Basheer Khan [Oberoi] is the token Indian Muslim, the kind who quotes the Quran and offers sage advice, Sqn. Ldr. Sukhdeep Singh [Banveen Singh] is the Sikh who exists just so that everyone and their AOC can have a laugh at his expense, and the ridiculously bad assembly of baddies, eyes lined with more kohl than most cosmetics retailers have in stock, talking loudly about their super-secret plans with no fear of moles, and just being generally incompetent (while this is low-stakes humour for local audiences, we’d do well to remember that the same incompetents have engineered multiple terror attacks in India). The writing, with all the depth of a kiddy dip-pool, is about as effective in creating tension or just getting one to invest in the story as a Sukhoi would be on the ground – looks good, that’s about it.

The general lack of competence spills over into the acting space: Kapoor has not been this one-note in a while, Grover is just a rather awkward performer with his stilted dialogue delivery and strange mannerisms, players like Mahesh Shetty and Banveen Singh are adequate but have nothing to do. The only real performer among the Air Dragons is Oberoi, who brings sincerity and feeling to Basheer, be it in the brief moment he has with Pathania about a patch on the latter’s uniform or at a bonfire when he tells Maverick Redux to be a team player.

Padukone is wasted, purely because the film is not interested in her beyond deploying Rathore as a means to make a point about how the gender of a pilot does not matter. And then the film sticks her in a Dhruv, rather than put her in the cockpit of a Sukhoi and actually make the point it wanted to (which isn’t to say hepter pilots are any lesser than their fighter counterparts). The actress has nothing to do except make eyes at Roshan’s Patty, and occasionally say something over the radio as she pilots her hepter. Why Padukone would agree to such a role is a question only she can answer.

And as the titular Fighter, Roshan is blander than he has possibly ever been. Looking cool and strutting around aside, he is on the worst idea of autopilot through the film, and when the Dalal brothers give him typical Bollywood dialogues to mouth, including a turd of a line about India-Occupied Pakistan (literally why would anyone want to occupy that country and administer it, to say nothing of the fact that India is not an expansionist state) and another about being the maaliks of Kashmir (while I fall on the side of the debate that the province acceded to India, filmmakers must learn to read the room and not add fuel to the fire, to say nothing of how unbecoming that line is: you’re an officer in the Indian Air Force, Patty, not a greedy leech of a zamindar!). That he tends to overcompensate during the worst of moments, nostrils getting extra exercise at a colleague’s funeral, face trembling as much as Delhi does every third day, makes Roshan appear even worse.

To cap things off, Anand decides to shoehorn into this adrenaline junky of a movie the most half-hearted romance in recent memory (it’s nearly as bad as the one in Brahmastra, and that’s saying something). Anand takes two of the most good-looking actors working in Hindi cinema and comes up with silly jokes and backstories that never leap off the page. Roshan has more chemistry with Sanjeeda Shaikh, playing an old friend of his, than he does with Padukone. Anand is also handicapped by the inability to put Minni and Patty in a room and have them engage in physical romance (one wonders if that’s a censor mandate, which then calls into question just how the CBFC believes armed forces personnel have children). Left with putting them on an Enfield, and dancing to a song that may or may not sound like the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive”, he is unable to make their scenes together work, which is a crying shame because someone deserves to have something good come out of this film, surely!

That group is likely the IAF pilots who got into the cockpits of their birds and showed off their skills. Never mind that the Sukhoi has been around for some three decades (though that is no reason to ram it into a PAF F-16, Patty! That aircraft cost the taxpayer nearly $300 million in 1996 US dollars): it looks cool, and that’s all Anand wants, really. Sadly, films don’t work on vibes alone: they have to have a bite in them, some fight in them.