Shubhra Gupta

Rogue spy Kabir is back, and this time around, he has a bigger task cut out for him. Perhaps the most difficult, says his father-figure mentor Colonel Luthra, a description which turns out to be prophetic. Yes, the task, to keep us glued to the screen, which is the solo ask of a fast-paced actioner, turns out to be not just difficult, but impossible. I’m sorry to report that War 2, the sixth instalment of the YRF Spy Universe, is nothing but a glossy snooze-fest.

It’s not the fault of this series that it comes exactly a week after the one which had the same theme. Well, almost. Salaakar is about scotching Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions with the help of canny footwork by Indian spies : this week’s new show on Netflix, Saare Jahaan Se Accha, created by Gaurav Shukla and directed by Sumit Purohit, is exactly about the same thing. The intent may be the same but the treatment, thankfully, is vastly different: the beyond-terrible Salakaar, with Naveen Kasturia leading the charge, reminds you of a comic-book with none of the fun of the genre; this Pratik Gandhi starrer, on the other hand, takes things seriously, and that’s a good thing, more or less.

Shifting focus from panchayats and chikitsalayas, TVF takes the legal route to tell the story of a generational conflict revolving around small-town court kacheris. Is Harish Mathur, whose acumen in the court-room has earned him legions of fans, wrong to assume that his son Param will follow in his footsteps? Is Param right in wanting to forge his own path, which will take him far away from both his father’s chosen profession, as well as the land of his birth?

Weapons movie review & rating: There’s something so eerie about a little girl calmly narrating the events of a horrific night during which, exactly at 2.17 am, seventeen children from the same class got out of their beds, walked out into the dark streets, and vanished, that you don’t want ‘Weapons’ to let you off the hook. Not even for a moment. Writer-director Zach Cregger, anointed the new horror-meister with the 2022 ‘Barbarian’, returns with a small-town-mystery-disappearance which could feel like a trope– so very Stephen Kingian in its thematic concerns- which manages to stay fresh and compelling, but only up until a point.

In 1974, Pakistan’s vaulting nuclear ambitions were spiked single-handedly by an Indian spy. And now, in 2025, the chatter around nukes is back again. Will Pak succeed this time around? How will India deal with the new threat? That’s the thrust of Faruk Kabir’s five-part series, ‘Salakaar’, reportedly based on real-life agent Ajit Doval’s canny moves back in the 70s, which find a fresh airing. This is yet another show built on showing the Pakistani establishment, including its then-president, as violent clowns, and the Indians as whip-smart. But it’s hard to take this iteration (writing credits are shared amongst Kabir, Spandan Mishra, Srinivas Abrol and Swati Tripathi) seriously: a scene which is meant to drip menace, has the supreme leader Zia Ullah (clearly based on Zia Ul-Haq, played by Mukesh Rishi) turn up himself at the Indian embassy with a dinner invitation for undercover agent-cum-attache Adhir Dayal (Naveen Kasturia).

There’s much that’s similar between the 2003 Freaky Friday and the 2025 Freakier Friday, starting with the central body-swapping premise, and the return of two main stars, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. The films may be separated by more than two decades, but the vibe is very much the same: get the sentiments out, but keep it broad and light, and make things right. In the previous one, Dr Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis) and teenage daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan) are at loggerheads by the former’s impending marriage, with the latter not thrilled at the prospect of a stepdad. This time around, it is the turn of former rocker-present celebrity events manager Anna’s Gen Z daughter Harper (Julia Butters) to be unhappy at the former falling hard for single hot dad Eric (Manny Jacinto), who is in possession of a daughter of his own, the very British Lily (Sophia Hammons), said girl being satisfactorily snooty and stand-offish, and therefore Harper’s enemy number one.

Often, a woman who finds the courage, and the words, to talk about an assault that’s happened to her, is asked why she is doing it ‘so late’. It’s easier to say ‘an’ assault, rather than ‘my’ assault because disassociation kicks in. Owning up to it becomes too much, and the only way to survive is to begin distancing from ‘the event’. All too often, it goes unaddressed, lying like an unhealed wound, pushing itself to the fore when the survivor least expects it. Debutant director Eva Victor’s ‘Sorry, Baby’ in which Victor plays Agnes, a professor in a small New England town, does have a Bad Thing happen to her. Her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who is visiting her when the film opens, was her grad school roommate, when it happened. In the film’s most chilling sequences, we are rendered spectators to the Bad Thing, at a remove. We see the tall, gangling, fresh-faced Agnes go into her thesis guide’s home at dusk: the lights go, hours elapse, and we wait, at a distance, as the camera stays unmoving and unflinching, for Agnes to come stumbling out, sit on the steps, wear her boots, and get into the car and drive back home, possibly the longest, and the most difficult, drive of her life.

I had nearly, and happily, forgotten most of the first Son Of Sardaar. Only when I saw Ajay Devgn in a nicely-tied turban looking lost in a ‘yeh kya ho raha hai’ manner, and the late Mukul Dev (this is his last film) and Vindu Singh roaming about aimlessly, that I had a flashback of the original. I wasn’t a fan of the first one. Part 2, with these three reprising their roles, accompanied by some new faces, strains to be a little better. But only just. Two elements have been added to the plot-what’s-that proceedings. One is a running India-Pakistan gag, in which a few characters are Pakistani, and they are not all ‘soorma-eyed’ terrorists (gasp). The other is a wonderful actor who should basically be given all the awards: a nearly-unrecognisable Deepak Dobriyal playing a trans person with brio, nearly runs away with the film. Or would have, if his character was given half a chance to do more than the all-over-the-place script allows him to.