Rohan Naahar

There is a difference between ambition and delusion. Ambition often depends on one’s means; delusion, on the other hand, hinges on one’s capability. The Diplomat isn’t an ambitious film for barring the brawny John Abraham from lifting a finger. But it’s certainly delusional for thinking of itself as a desi answer to Argo. There is, however, a more unexpected comparison that the movie invites, without realising that it is guilty of committing the same mistakes that it is so confidently calling out. But more on that later. Directed by Shivam Nair, The Diplomat projects itself as a feminist film, but it is actually a tribute to male ego. A dramatically inert distillation of a multi-pronged story, The Diplomat takes a typically Bollywood approach to telling a story about a woman’s emancipation and empowerment. It frames its narrative from the perspective of Abraham’s character, India’s Deputy High Commissioner in Pakistan, JP Singh. But it is actually the story of Uzma Ahmed, an Indian woman played by Sadia Khateeb, who is conned into marrying a Pakistani man named Tahir. They met in Malaysia, where he was working as a taxi driver. A few months into their relationship, Tahir moved back home and invited her to join him there. But he had an ulterior motive.

If they can keep all the dads satisfied with shows about burly men going on secret missions and feuding families in the American West, they can certainly take care of the moms as well. Netflix’s The Four Seasons, a comedy drama that follows three married couples across one year, is designed as something of a palate cleanser for middle-aged audiences to watch between the latest true crime offerings. It’s pleasant enough to qualify as undemanding, and has enough moments of insight to elevate it above the ambient TV line. The Four Seasons isn’t good, but it’s good enough. And good enough is good enough these days, especially if you’ve just survived stuff like Jewel Thief or Nadaaniyan. Co-created by and starring Tina Fey, The Four Seasons features a stacked cast that also includes her Saturday Night Live buddy Will Forte — they play a couple — as well as Steve Carell and two-time Oscar nominee Colman Domingo. Think of The Four Seasons as the Friends reunion you never got. These characters could just as easily have been living in New York City apartments back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, worried about where life will take them.

A comedian recounts the four traumatic years that he spent in a juvenile detention centre as a teen in the Israeli coming-of-age drama Bad Boy, now out on Netflix. The eight-episode series is interspersed with grainy footage of the comedian, who goes by Daniel, telling jokes about his troubled youth and life-threatening stint in juvie. He used to be called Dean Shaiman back then, and it’s a miracle that he survived. Co-created by Ron Leshem, who remains best-known for the original Euphoria, the series can best be described as the unholy lovechild of Adolescence and Seinfeld. Like that landmark Netflix mini-series, which shattered viewership records only a few weeks ago, Bad Boy opens with a teenage boy being arrested by cops armed with a search warrant of his house. His bedroom is turned upside down, and within minutes, he’s shoved into the back seat of a police car before his mother can even get him his clothes. Like Jamie Miller from Adolescence, Dean is a deeply troubled kid. The difference is that Bad Boy lets us in on his psyche from minute one. The question, then, isn’t if he’s a problem child, but why he’s a problem child.

Unlike his fellow Franco-Belgian comic book icon Tintin, Asterix has a rich history of representation in cinema and on television. While Tintin has inspired mainly the beloved Canadian cartoon adaptation and a criminally underrated feature film directed by Steven Spielberg, the adventures of Asterix the Gaul have spawned 18 films, 15 board games, 40 video games, and one theme park. The latest is a glossy Netflix mini-series, originally announced in 2021 but released only this week. Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight is based on the 1964 comic of the same name, and will likely delight generations of readers who’ve grown up with the character.

Everybody just needs to calm down in Havoc, the long-awaited new movie from Welsh director Gareth Evans. Starring Tom Hardy, it appears to be an attempt by Evans to deliberately distance himself from his two Raid films. Those movies introduced the world to a Pencak Silat, an Indonesian martial art that had previously never been represented on screen in such delectable detail. Evans filmed the combat scenes in those movies the way that Quentin Tarantino films feet. In Havoc, however, he replaces the frenetic fisticuffs with gory gunfights. The result is about as brutal, and far more stylish than anything he’s ever done before.

Many years ago, Netflix announced a grand prequel series to SS Rajamouli’s landmark Baahubali films. A cast was assembled and paraded before the press in Singapore; the series was even given a title: Baahubali: Before the Beginning. It was filmed at Ramoji; people were taken on tours of the set. But the final show was deemed unworthy of Netflix’s server space, and, in an admirable display of creative integrity, it was decided that the project be revamped before being shown to the world. A new creative team was brought on board, and the entire thing was redone with a different cast. Remarkably, even the 2.0 version failed to meet Netflix’s high standards — we are, after all, talking about the same streamer that nodded in approval when presented with Jewel Thief: The Heist Begins — and the mega-budget project, on which hundreds of crores had already been spent, put out of its misery.

When Edgar Wright dropped out of directing the first Ant-Man movie for Marvel, pretty much everybody agreed that it was for the best. He ended up making the wholly original Baby Driver instead. Ditto for Ava DuVernay, who passed on directing Black Panther for the studio. They went with Ryan Coogler, who delivered a true cultural touchstone; Black Panther became the first superhero movie to earn a Best Picture nod at the Oscars and catapulted Coogler into a club normally restricted to white visionaries such as Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan. But it seems like Coogler always knew that the invite was conditional; while his white counterparts could go on to do whatever they wanted next, as a Black filmmaker with one blockbuster under his belt, he’d have to provide further proof of his capacity to comply — a guarantee, if you will, before he could be allowed to make something as audacious as his fifth feature, Sinners.

The thing about movies that are easy to pitch is that they’re also highly unoriginal. You could imagine the writers of Fight or Flight strolling into an executive’s office and giving them an animated breakdown of the story, describing it as ‘Speed meets Bullet Train’, and promptly being given a green light. Directed by James Madigan and starring Josh Hartnett, Fight or Flight borrows liberally from B-movies past, struggling and failing to come up with something novel. It isn’t a long movie, but it doesn’t feel as short as its 90-minute run-time might suggest either. Hartnett plays Lucas Reyes, a mercenary who is hiding out in Bangkok after a job gone wrong. He is awoken from a liquor-induced slumber one morning by his ex, who operates some sort of shady organisation dedicated to world peace or something. Lucas is instructed to hightail it to the airport and board a flight bound for San Francisco. Aboard the flight is a mysterious, high-value target known only as ‘The Ghost’. Needless to say, Lucas isn’t the only person after them.