Tehran

There is a scam in Punjab that Rajkumar Hirani would’ve heard about while researching Dunki. Shady travel agents are charging crores from desperate (and mostly uneducated) Indians with the promise of arranging safe passage to the American state of Georgia. The scam? These poor men are being sent to the country of Georgia instead. In most cases, they’ve sold off family land, quit their jobs, and exhausted their entire life savings; some of them even have wives and children with them. All to be sent to the land of khachapuri. To put it simply, there are a bunch of people from Bathinda knocking about in the Caucasus right now. Anyway, the folks who made the new John Abraham film Tehran are no smarter. The movie opens with a voiceover in which we are told about an operation carried out by Iran in 2012, where Israeli diplomats were targeted in Thailand, India, and Georgia. They meant the country. But the map that the movie shows instead is that of the US state.

TEHRAN is the latest John Abraham film, where the actor is out to avenge. For a while, it was the country (Parmanu, Satyameva Jayate); then it became more pointed (in both Vedaa and The Diplomat, he saves a girl). A less obvious, but more definite, shift has been his heroism, which has shapeshifted from a combative force to inner resilience. It has become less showy and more nuanced, more cerebral and less extraneous, much like the nationalism in his filmography. In that sense, Tehran is an able extension of this humanity that props up the ideas of protection without losing sight of the cost. In Delhi, 2012, an Israeli diplomat’s car was bombed. Similar blasts occurred in Georgia and Thailand. But the one which we see in the capital (designed in a sleek shot; Evgeniy Gubrenko and Andre Menezes are the cinematographers) results in an unwitting casualty. A young girl on the street, not much older than the daughter of ACP Rajeev Kumar (Abraham), suffers injury. This pulls him into the case even when he was hesitant initially.

In Tehran, director Arun Gopalan adapts the high-stakes geopolitics of 2012 into a tense espionage drama. The film’s premise is rooted in a real incident: the February 2012 bomb attack near the Israeli Embassy in Delhi, part of a coordinated series of assaults on Israeli diplomats in Georgia, Thailand, and India. Based on a story written by Bindi Karia, with screenplay and dialogues by Karia and Ritesh Shah, the film uses that flashpoint as the launchpad for a fictional covert mission that spans continents and moral boundaries. At the heart of the narrative is ACP Rajiv Kumar, known as RK (John Abraham), a Delhi police officer described as obsessive by nature and a loose cannon. At the start of the film, RK is focussed on bringing down the Makwana gang, which has threatened his family. But after the bombing of the Israeli diplomat’s car, RK is assigned to investigate the attack. The deadly car-bombing sequence—executed with emotional, dramatic and cinematic intensity—sets off RK’s vendetta. As the mission stretches from Delhi to Georgia, the UK, Abu Dhabi, and finally to Tehran, it becomes clear that this is not just a spy game—it’s about the messy entanglements of global politics, energy deals, and fractured alliances.

Tehran, directed by Arun Gopalan and produced by Dinesh Vijan, Shobhna Yadav, and Sandeep Leyzell, is another addition to the growing catalogue of Indian espionage thrillers inspired by real-world geopolitical tensions. This one takes on the 2012 attacks on Israeli diplomats, using them as a launchpad for a fictional yet politically steeped narrative set against the volatile backdrop of Iran-Israel hostilities. Over the past decade, John Abraham has become something of a regular fixture in action-diplomatic thrillers — and Tehran continues this trajectory. In the role of DCP Rajeev Kumar, Abraham plays a tormented officer who dives headfirst into a complex international conspiracy after a bomb blast in Delhi kills an innocent flower-seller. The event serves as a catalyst, pushing him into an unsanctioned and personal mission of justice.

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.