Dirs: Abhishek Anil Kapur, Sandeep Kewlani. With: Akshay Kumar, Nimrat Kaur, Sari Ali Khan, Veer Pahariya. 125 mins. Cert: 15
The hope would be that the Hindi mainstream is learning from its current spell of commercial turbulence. The visual evidence, alas, suggests otherwise. For Republic Day 2024, we were offered Fighter, a glossy all-star flypast that found the industry aping Top Gun: Maverick with more explicit 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 aerial 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 about its saluting. Scenes are timestamped to underline the factual basis; the xenophobia gets dialled down as far as this 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, likable 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 other dogfight has the look of cut scenes from a mid-Nineties PlayStation game.
The obvious lesson is how these filmed military parades perk up whenever their characters travel off-base. Though curtailed by sirens, 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 the star displays some leadership in steering matters towards a humanist centreground. 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.
Sky Force is now showing in selected cinemas.
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