Tehran

In a bomb blast near the Israeli embassy in Delhi, a six-year-old Indian girl is killed. The blasts coincide with the death of two diplomats in other parts of the globe. Rajeev Kumar, Vijay and Divya, cops from the Special Cell, are out to catch the culprit, Afshar Hosseini, even if it means risking the cancellation of an international gas deal, pressure from superiors to call off the covert operation. John Abraham’s not new to slipping into the shoes of an officer bound by duty; it’s a role and a film tailor-made for him. His agility, body language and restraint help his cause, though the redundancy in his choices dampens the impact considerably. He could do more to loosen up. Manushi Chhillar delivers the goods with a neat, focused performance. She leaves no scope for a false note.

For a change, Pakistan is not the pivot of a Bollywood script that has a terror attack at its centre. Based on real events, Tehran draws from the alleged concerted Iranian attack on Israeli embassies in India, Georgia, and Thailand in 2012. Waiting in the wings for a while, Tehran assumes importance at a time when West Asia is on the boil again because of strained relations between Iran and Israel. The film shows how the two countries attack each other’s interests, but in this case, India, which has friendly ties with both Iran and Israel, gets caught in the crossfire between the two countries fighting a war of civilisations.

Tehran, led by John Abraham, Manushi Chillar, and Neeru Bajwa follows the attacks on Israeli diplomats which took place in 2012. The action thriller film directed by Arun Gopalan not only follows the story of justice at the hands of an Indian officer, but also the geopolitics that is just as important. The makers do not focus on the star power but on the story they wish to showcase. The film begins with John Abraham’s ACP Rajeev Kumar taking down a major gangster without any protocol after he had threatened his family. When the cops arrive, he just hands over the case and asks him to take care of it. On the other hand, as his daughter is returning from school, a similar car is attacked and blasts off in the middle of the road, injuring by standards and killing an innocent 6 year old girl.

It’s raining spies everywhere you turn, but it’s in ‘Tehran’ that you actually get a sense of what the work entails– it could mean putting in long, hard hours in nondescript offices, and the field operations that are shown as fast-paced car-and-copter-chases in the movies is, in this John Abraham-starrer, mostly about learning how to hide in plain sight, even as the danger of betrayal looms at every step. Abraham plays Rajeev Kumar, an intelligence officer who gets embroiled in the dirty business involving two foreign nations, Israel and Iran, on Indian soil. A blast in New Delhi results in the death of a little girl, a bystander with zero stakes in the long-standing conflict in the Middle East, and RK finds himself moving from the periphery to the centre. It’s no longer about the job; it is now personal.

After holding back his heroic sentiments to a staggeringly subdued degree by his standards in The Diplomat, John Abraham flexes his patriotic chops in Tehran. This Arun Gopalan-directed geopolitical thriller, penned by Bindni Karia, Ritesh Shah and Ashish Prakash Verma plots a clash between personal revenge and political strategies using a true event – the 2012 Israel embassy car blast in New Delhi, Thailand and Georgia – as a trigger. Having turned the daredevil, deadpan government agent into his calling card, John comfortably takes on the role of an Indian special cells officer Rajeev Kumar determined to nab the perpetrators when an attack, prompted by Israel-Iran’s hostilities, results in the death of a street kid his daughter’s age on his own soil. As infuriating as this ‘collateral damage’ is, Tehran is never able to convincingly portray it as reason enough for his insubordination after his bosses withdraw their orders to nail the Iranian hand and pro-Palestine groups behind it.