As I said in the No Spoilers, the worst fault of this film is that it was BORING. To the point that I may have missed plot points because it was just so DULL. Even worse, I noticed plot holes because I wasn’t distracted enough.
Whole Plot:
The top pilots in India are assigned together to Srinagar as a special team. Dips is a helicopter pilot, Hrithik is a fighter plane pilot, Hrithik knows some of the other people from flight school, the whole group becomes friends with Anil Kapoor as their leader. But Anil resents Hrithik because Hrithik’s mission tactics caused the death of Hrithik’s fiancee/Anil’s sister. Train train train, and then some terrorists blow up an army convoy. Hrithik goes to Delhi and suggests a strike on the terrorist training camp. His team carries it out and Hrithik does some cool dogfighting with a Pakistani fighter pilot, “Red Nose”. In response, Evil Terrorist convinces the Pakistani air force to send planes to bomb munitions areas. Hrithik and his crew chase them down, but Hrithik disobeys orders and goes into enemy territory and his best friend ends up shot down and a prisoner of war. Anil sends Hrithik away in disgrace to teach at the flight academy in Hyderabad, Hrithik and Dips say goodbye. Hrithik finishes the term then goes back to Srinigar to visit his Dad and (hopefully) meet his friend when he is rescued. But the rescue goes wrong, and Hrithik runs out and insists on taking a plane to save his friends. He and Anil fly together, then run their plane into Red Nose to defeat him, eject, and somehow land and join a big boring shoot out/punch out/explosions fight scene as the rescue mission goes wrong. In the end Hrithik does a big punchy thing against the head Evil Terrorist, then everyone flies home and Deepika and Hrithik kiss on the tarmac.
I skipped various pieces in there but that’s okay because none of them mattered. Like, there’s a failed diplomatic attempt to rescue the pilots, but all that does is kill time until Hrithik can rush in and save the day, there’s no actual plot purpose to it. Big thrust of the story is Hrithik is a hothead, and then everything goes wrong and Anil realizes “hey, we need a hothead!”
Also big thrust of the story is “let’s be macho and aggressive in all ways because that’s what WINS and it’s all about WINNING!”. Blech, hate that. And it’s so superficial too! Like, as I am watching this movie talking about how “we are better because we do this and they do that” I’m thinking “wait, the movie itself JUST SHOWED ME that you actually both do both this and that”. Forget the international politics of it, it never even manages to convince me that Hrithik is the Best Pilot versus all the other pilots.
And it’s sooooooooooooo sloooooooooooooooooow!!! We have sooooooooooooooooooooo long watching this team Bond as a Team before the first song, let alone an action sequence. Compared to War or Pathaan, where they barely get names and then we are in the action. Fine by me! I don’t come to an action movie for deep interpersonal dialogue, I come for ACTION. Oh, and the dialogue is dreadful too of course. It’s not even peppy and fun, it feels like everyone is slooooooooowly trying to remember their lines and then saying it, just getting through the chore of this scene so they can move on to the next one.
The romance/Deepika’s character in particular is SUCH a waste. She’s got an interesting backstory, her family disowned her because she joined the army to be a pilot. She’s supposed to be this cocky “don’t tell me what to do!” type of person. But she doesn’t get the dialogue or direction to give her that character, plus it’s Deepika, that’s not a natural sort of role for her to play onscreen (cocky competitive person versus warm and wise). On top of that, they the vomit patriarchy all over the family storyline. Hrithik meets her parents and “teaches” her father to be proud of her, and that solves everything. So, number 1, we have Hrithik Mansplaining feminism instead of Dips (or any other woman) speaking for her. Number 2, we have Hrithik talking to her father while her mother is LITERALLY silent in the background because obviously she doesn’t get to make any choices in this situation. And Number 3, once again, we have the casual acceptance that parents hating their daughters is “normal”. No one goes, “wow, your parents cut you off because you wouldn’t get married? That’s crazy!” They just go “ah yes, father’s are like that, perfectly normal and expected”. VOMIT!
But all of this, I don’t feel like I can critique the film as having a Bad Message, or at least not the filmmakers for having a Bad Message. I think it’s just a poorly made movie. There isn’t THAT much difference between Dips in this and Dips in Pathaan (cocky equal, father issues, etc.) it’s just that in Pathaan her dialogue was better, and her backstory had a few more drafts, and it became feminism-that-acknowledges-reality instead of feminism-that-accepts-reality-as-how-things-have-to-be. Same with the politics, same thing as in War and Pathaan that the issues are aggressively NOT religious, and the bad guy is officially NOT part of a particular Nation-State. Only it’s just missing those little added touches like John Abraham having that complicated capitalist motivation along with personal vengeance.
If I look at the film purely as a film, as what it tried and failed to be, hands down the worst flaw is the lousy action sequences. Hrithik is an old man, he can’t do hand to hand and it was never his top skill anyway. In War, they brought in Tiger for that and it was AWESOME. In Pathaan, they blew the budget on HUGE set piece fight scenes that were about so much more than the fighting (I don’t care if John and SRK are moving slow, if they are fighting ON TOP OF A MOVING BUS). The goal was edge of your seat action every five minutes however they could make it work. This movie, there’s literally ONE fight scene, way at the end, the final confrontation. The rest of it is airplane stunts and talky talk. COME ONE NOW!
Before you say “but, it doesn’t make sense for there to be fight scenes! They were pilots!” let me remind you of EVERY OTHER INDIAN ACTION MOVIE EVER. I want the scene where some gundas misbehave with Dips at a movie theater, or where a kid loses his toy dog from the bus and Hrithik has to chase it down on a motorcycle, or where Hrithik and Anil Kapoor work out their aggression in a homoerotic wrestling match. Have the plane fights, sure, but give us something else as well, some flavor in here.
Yeah, just a boring movie. Watch the song videos, watch Top Gun/Maverick, and otherwise skip it. Unless you really need a Hrithik action movie and there are no others available.
