Phantom ***
Dir: Kabir Khan.
With: Saif Ali Khan, Katrina Kaif, Rajesh Tailang, Denzil Smith. 136 mins.
Cert: 15
Just as 9/11 gave
rise, after an appropriate mourning period, to a decade of soul- and
cave-searching in American cinema, so the spectre of the 26/11 attacks on
Mumbai in 2008 seems likely to hover over Indian cinema for the foreseeable
future. Already we’ve had 2013’s Greengrassy docudrama The Attacks of 26/11, the veteran Ram Gopal Varma’s sober
recounting of these events from the perspective of Rakesh Maria, the Mumbai
chief of police. There now arrives Phantom,
Kabir Khan’s adaptation of Hussain Zaidi’s speculative fiction Mumbai Avengers, which owes more to the 24/Homeland
school of counterterrorism, vacillating as it does between pulpy pertinence and
arrant wish-fulfilment.
Objections have
already been lodged by both Médecins Sans Frontières and the suspected Pakistani terrorist Hafiz Saeed, suggesting action
specialist Khan is operating on a broad spectrum of offence. Yet this pacy film
propels us through its problematic patches, and also proves unexpectedly
telling as to how insecure India feels over the fact the attack’s masterminds
remain at large, from the moment a policy wonk decries the lack of an official
response: “All we do is stop playing cricket”. Enter the Jack Bauer-like
Daniyal Khan (Saif Ali Khan), a disgraced army officer sent on a hushed-up
mission to flush the killers out, deploying methods that really aren’t cricket.
As Daniyal barrels
around – from the Oval via the Middle East to a final date with destiny in
Pakistani waters – he gathers an aid worker sidekick (Katrina Kaif), and the
tension that exists between these two represents a split that surely exists
within Indian intelligence ranks: she urging caution, data-collection and the
need to play the long game, he dashing around terminating, wherever possible,
with extreme prejudice. You’ll just have to overlook the fact that as shadow
operatives go, the well-groomed Saif and the ever-lipglossed Kaif form a couple
broadly as inconspicuous as the Kardashian Wests; their movements don’t demand
surveillance so much as a Vanity Fair
spread.
Jolting dashes of
realpolitik continue to permeate the action: the heads of a Pakistan-based
terror organisation opt to meet Daniyal in Syria, reasoning that nobody will
notice another dead body there. Yet the director is far more adept at
constructing taut assassination set-pieces than he is at diplomacy: the incendiary
editorial on Pakistan is handled with rather less than due diligence. The film
does something very dubious with Kaif’s character, introduced flashing her
“Medicine International” credentials as a voice of reason: after key scenes go
missing around the intermission, she’s suddenly – like so many characters in 24 – transformed into a moist-eyed
apologist for the hero’s bloodier responses. You can see why MSF would be
irked.
They won’t be the
only ones, for Phantom displays that
unique pulp mix of motion and emotion that is compelling and revealing, but
also deeply discomfiting to encounter. This relentless, reckless,
wounded-bull-in-a-china-shop production is fuelled by a violence you can see in
the leading man’s eyes and feel in its whiplash crosscuts, all of it directed
towards getting hold of the attackers, and not necessarily bringing them to
justice. (With lyrics like “I couldn’t handle this atrocity of love”, even the
songs sound like calls to arms.) That violence gives Khan’s film its undeniable
grip and punch – but we might pause to consider whether this region hasn’t seen
and heard enough of it already.
Phantom is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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