Priyanka Roy

While there have been scores of films made on the Indian Army and the country’s Air Force, it is quite baffling that Hindi mainstream cinema has hardly explored the exemplary bravery of the unsung heroes of the BSF. The Border Security Force, aptly known as ‘The First Line of Defence’, is the focus of Ground Zero, this Friday’s release in theatres, and a biopic of sorts of Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey. It was NND’s sharpness, his eye on the eye of the fish focus, and the passion and patriotism that a man in uniform has by default for his country, that resulted in the killing of Ghazi Baba, the chief of Jaish-e-Mohammed and the man responsible for scores of terrorist attacks, most significantly the Parliament carnage of 2001.

In terms of definition and DNA, the heist genre has had one formula down pat — style is greater than substance. The films in this world demand a willing suspension of disbelief in exchange for the promise of edge-of-the-seat thrills, high-octane action sequences, pretty people strutting around in eye-pleasing locations and, more often than not, a final twist that makes even the most ridiculous bits that precede it, worth it. Somewhat. Jewel Thief — The Heist Begins (it ends close to two hours later with the ‘warning’: The Heist Continues’, no spoiler this) ticks off all the tried-and-tired tropes of the genre to slapdash a heist film which evoked an unthinkable emotion within me — I missed the Race films (yes, yes, I am embarrassed). For whatever it is worth, the three films in the Race franchise — two of which starred Saif Ali Khan — oscillated, within its twist-a-second template, between lousy and ludicrous. Jewel Thief is, politely put, simply lame.

A mom allows her nine-year-old daughter her first-ever sleepover at the home of her new friend in school. When she lands up the next afternoon to pick her up, her world falls apart when she discovers that her daughter has vanished, with no trace of the family that supposedly lived there. That is the rather intriguing premise of The Stolen Girl, a pulpy, if often incongruous thriller, that relies a lot on convenience and contrivance, but is engaging while it lasts. Playing out on Jio Hotstar over five pacy episodes, The Stolen Girl is akin to a page turner, a trifle sensationalist if you may, tracing how the seemingly perfect lives of Elisa Blix (Denise Gough), a high-flying stewardess, and her lawyer husband Fred (Jim Sturgess) come to a standstill when their nine-year-old daughter Lucia is kidnapped. The police are pressed into action, even as red herrings — a ransom note, Fred’s brief affair, Elisa’s predilection to document every aspect of her life on social media — are strewn all through the narrative. It is good fun while it lasts, but The Stolen Girl — Eva Husson directs an adaptation by Catherine Moulton of the 2020 Alex Dahl-written novel Playdate — sacrifices its potential to become yet another series that doesn’t know what to do with its material after the initial episodes.

As is the case with most Akshay Kumar films in which he plays a real-life character — frankly, at this point, is there any other kind of Akshay Kumar film, apart from the odd comedy here and there? — Kesari: Chapter 2 cannot escape the trademark saviour complex that its leading man comes with. But unlike some of Kumar’s recent outings in this sub-genre of sorts, what acts as a ‘saviour’ here, however, is that despite a lot of theatrics on display, Kesari 2 is a largely well-made film. The second film in the Kesari franchise — which has no bearing on the first, a 2019 outing in which Akshay played Havildar Ishar Singh, the man at the forefront of the Battle of Saragarhi who almost single-handedly took on a regiment of the British — the focus lies on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and its aftermath. Kesari: Chapter 2 bills itself as ’the untold story’ of the genocide that perhaps remains the darkest chapter in India’s colonial history. The first few minutes of Kesari 2, directed by Karan Singh Tyagi and jointly produced by Karan Johar and Akshay Kumar, hit the viewer hard. Despite having watched the massacre that killed thousands of innocents in Amritsar on the Baisakhi day of 1919, dramatised several times on screens big and small, there is no escaping the horror that engulfs you as a viewer as the British troops, under the orders of General Reginald Dyer, fired indiscriminately at men, women and children until “the bullets ran out”. The official figure was put at 1,650, but the body count was several thousand more.

Losing a phone is an inconvenience for most, a nightmare for many. For Pratyush Dua, it becomes a question of life and death. Pratyush aka ‘Pratman’ is an influencer — the kind that have swarmed around us in the oft-repeated dime a dozen manner — whose life in the Internet bubble is solely based on getting to 10 million followers on Instagram faster than his immediate rival. For that, Pratman is willing to do all it takes, with everything about his persona, including his jarring ringtone screaming ‘Notice Me’. Until one day when his phone stops ringing. Stolen by someone who claims to be his biggest fan, Pratyush — played by Babil Khan in Logout, now streaming on Zee5 — not only faces the usual comes-with-the-territory misdemeanours of identity theft, digital arrest, data leak and so on, he also finds himself quickly losing control over a ‘world’ he thought he had complete power in.

Early in Chhorii 2, Nushrratt Bharuccha’s Sakshi, a school teacher, is in the process of explaining the concept of ‘cavemen’ — their origin and evolution — to her young students. Given that a major part of the film, thereafter, will play out underground, with the action being dominated by an ‘aadi manav’, loosely translated in English as ‘original man’/‘first man’, it is an intelligent and effective foreshadowing technique employed by director Vishal Furia. But while Chhorii 2 does traverse some intriguing territory in marrying quite a few novel horror tropes with the greater horrors that the human mind is capable of, it eventually descends into a hurried hodgepodge of mumbo-jumbo and banal balderdash.

Writer 1: The first of our two leading men is a cricket legend past his prime. He has been out of form lately, and his place in the playing XI, ahead of a crucial India-Pakistan Test series — let’s call it ‘Freedom Series’ (slow clap) — is in jeopardy. His name is Arjun, but everyone, including his son, calls him ‘Dada’ (wink, wink). We can cast Siddharth, but a statutory clause in his contract has to be that he has to wear a perpetually pained expression throughout. In terms of grumpiness, we can ask him to channel Rang De Basanti’s Karan Singhania, but in a far inferior film. Writer 2: The other man, Saravanan, is a MIT graduate. Not Manipal, but Massachusetts, as he reiterates in the film with indignation. At least twice or thrice, we will make him say that he wanted to become the next Steve Jobs. He calls himself a scientist, runs a canteen in Chennai and is working on a project that he hopes will make Tamil Nadu the leader in fuel cell technology in the country. In a totally unrelated characteristic, he is also obsessed with biryani. We will put that in a couple of times in the script (note: look for a sponsor). But a twist of fate changes him. Since R. Madhavan just played an unhinged character in Shaitaan, let’s cast him. But tell him that he’s ‘crazy’, not unhinged, otherwise he tends to go overboard. And yes, make him sound like he is from MIT. Let him quote Jack Kerouac: ‘The only people for me are the mad ones’. Let him break into devilish laughter without any reason. Towards the end, make sure he stops shaving. How will he look and sound crazy otherwise?

‘Welcome to hell,’ says Salman Khan somewhere at the beginning of Sikandar. It doesn’t take you long to realise he was warning you about his own film. Salman, set to turn 60 this December, was never much of an actor (I use ‘much’ with much politeness). Except, perhaps, for few and far between flashes of some sort of emoting — and emotion — in films like Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Tere Naam, and a fistful of others. The last film he truly ‘acted’ in was Kabir Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan, and that was 10 years ago. In the last couple of outings (see box), the indifference has been evident, with directors employing everything from miraculous computer graphics to superhuman editing skills to simply ensure that Salman is a living presence on screen. In Sikandar, Salman’s disinterest has peaked, and in a directly proportional manner, so has our disillusionment.