The hope is that the Hindi mainstream is learning from its current spell of commercial turbulence. The evidence, alas, suggests otherwise. For Republic day in 2024, we got Fighter, a glossy all-star flypast that aped Top Gun: Maverick with added flagwaving; despite a considerable promotional push, it divebombed at the box office. This year, we get Sky Force, a period variation on much the same theme, unpicking the fallout from an Indian strike on a Pakistani airbase during the conflict of 1965. While avoiding complete crash-and-burn, directors Abhishek Anil Kapur and Sandeep Kewlani are but tinkering within an increasingly resistible framework.
For starters, this sortie is sober rather than flashy. Scenes are timestamped to underline the factual basis; the xenophobia gets dialled down as far as the genre allows. Yet the arms budget has also been slashed in Fighter’s wake. It’s not so noticeable on the ground, where Akshay Kumar’s upright Group Captain Ahuja briefs his squadron of young Tigers: flyboys with try-hard call names like Cockroach, Panther and Bull. (Imperfectly-chiselled, almost-hunky newcomer Veer Pahariya draws the short straw as Tabby, Sky Force’s own Private Ryan.) You can’t, however, miss the cheapness up in the air, where every dogfight has the look of cutscenes from a mid-90s PlayStation game.
The obvious lesson is how these filmed military parades perk up whenever their characters travel off-base. The one musical number has colour beyond khaki; there’s even stuff to like in the perfunctory domestic scenes. Yet the boys keep being recalled to barracks for scenes organised less around spectacle than a po-faced idea of duty. As in 2016’s Rustom and 2021’s Bellbottom, period garb fits Kumar well, and he displays some leadership in steering matters towards a humanist centre ground. But the character still wants a medal pinned to his chest, and the movie still ends by insisting “dying for your country is an honourable sacrifice, not suicide”. C’mon producers: give peace a chance.
Source: theguardian.com
