War 2

Ayan Mukerji- the man who gave us the brilliant Wake Up! Sid and enjoyable Yeh Jawani Hai Diwani takes a leap of faith to give us the most massy film of his career, YRF-backed War 2. Part of the studio’s Spyverse, War 2 picks up from where War (2019) had ended and gives us two new heroes- Kabir (Hrithik Roshan) and Vikram (Jr NTR, making his Bollywood debut in this one). The result should have been electrifying -considering it combines the best of North and South cinema- but falls into the usual trappings of an illogical, larger-than-life spy film that Bollywood- particularly YRF- has been feeding us for the past few years. War 2 thrills but also gives a sense of Deja Vu, which isn’t necessarily a good thing.

On (very expensive) paper, War 2 continues the trademarks of the YRF Spy Universe. The globe-trotting reaches a point where it’s just showing off: Japan, Spain, Italy, Abu Dhabi, Switzerland, probably Siberia. Characters dare not meet in a non-exotic (or local) landscape; conversations that could be emails happen in ice caves too. The set-pieces feature cobblestoned car chases, a snowy samurai slaughterhouse (with two expressive wolves), physics-mocking airplane action, speeding train accidents, ships and speedboats on F1 tracks, even cable cars. I’m almost afraid to see the passports of the production crew. There’s plenty of homoerotic tension parading as male friendship (level: one rod pierces two bodies), a dance-off, furtive glances above the clouds, tragic lines like “I couldn’t belong to anybody — not even my country — after you”.

Metaphors in Hindi films come with brass bands and neon signs. War 2 opens, as Pushpa 2 (2024) did, in Japan. A yakuza family is sitting down to dinner when a raggedy wolf walks in, followed by an emissary with news of an approaching army. The army, it turns out, is ol’ green eyes, erstwhile RAW agent turned freelance assassin Kabir (Hrithik Roshan). He looks wilder than he did in War (2019), dispatching waves of armed killers with a grim smile until it’s just him and the hound left. It’s almost like he’s become… a lone wolf. After the Japan job, Kabir is hired by Kali, a shadowy crime cartel with a representative each from Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. They’re bent on some kind of world domination, though all their plans invariably centre on India. Kabir is key, the superspy patriot who now kills his own people, for a price. But writers Sridhar Raghavan and Abbas Tyrewala know that even if Kali believes Kabir has turned, the audience knows better. And so, soon after, it’s made clear that Kabir going rogue is part of a mission to destroy the cartel from within.

Spies, by default, are meant to be the most innocuous, even insidious, presence in a room. They need to blend in, careful to not let any eyes linger on them or guess their intent and movement. But when super agent Kabir walks into any room — or for that matter, any space — men, women, children, canines, felines, amphibians, invertebrates and what have you — can’t take their eyes off him. In that sense, Kabir is the antithesis of a secret agent, a test, that in theory he should have flunked at entry level. But then, Kabir is played by Hrithik Roshan. Greek ‘gawk’ is his middle name.

This was the nadir YRF was fast plummeting to when Saiyaara lifted it temporarily. It’s a thud back to Thugs of Hindostan times. Around halftime, the thought was, so far so bad. But it got worse. We’d walked with a wolf, sparred in Japanese, fought an army of samurais, had car to car, bonnet to bonnet confrontations, travelled from Berlin to Delhi to the Somalian seas and the Himalayas, had coffee in Spain, got introduced to forced acronyms like MICE and LDBD, met Kaul (Anil Kapoor), the new RAW chief, saw Luthra (Ashutosh Rana) the old chief die with ‘India First’ on his lips, and we met Kabir (Hrithik Roshan), Vikram (NTR Jr) and Kavya (Kiara Advani) with ‘Aavan jaavan’ playing in the background. But, and it’s a big but, we hadn’t moved from where we’d begun.

Ayan Mukerji’s War 2 is the sixth film in the Yash Raj Spy Universe. It is a precarious position to be in, not least because its prequel, Siddharth Anand’s War (2019) remains objectively fun. A more pressing concern is that through the years — from Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger (2012) to now — the politics of the setting has altered. India in 2025 is not what it was a decade ago, and the shift has transformed other things. What would be identified as sweeping patriotism in the past runs the risk of being jingoistic now; what would qualify as defending the country now translates to not questioning it.