WAR is a wafer thin plot twisted a couple of times which romances the bodies of its two lead hero’s so much so that Vaani Kapoor, who is introduced in a song wearing various bikini dresses stated in an interview, “I am fighting for attention, and these two are hogging all the limelight”.
Kabir (Hrithik Roshan), an Indian soldier(?), intelligence operative(?), secret agent(?) and his team – which has a new addition in Khalid (Tiger Shroff) – are after Rizwan Iiyasi, a dreaded terrorist(?), weapon dealer(?) who is out to destroy Brahma, an Indian satellite that the Army uses to communicate with its front line soldiers. Kabir turns rogue after the first mission for some unknown reason and Khalid is assigned to hunt him down and kill him. But it turns out that Kabir was killed in the first mission itself and another team member in that missuion – Vishal (Shahbaz Akhtar) – who is presumed dead, is actually a mole and has taken over Khalid’s face and infiltrated the ranks. The rest of the story is how Kabir unravels the plot and figures out that Khalid is in fact a ‘pyada‘ (pawn). In between is a little backstory of Khalid who has to prove his patriotism because his father was traitor(?). Just to confuse the audience and make them go ‘what just happened’, this plot has 2 chronological cuts – from present day to 2 years ago in the first half and then again from present day to 6 months ago in the second half. It takes 154 minutes to tell this basic plot point where 3 people do all the heavy lifting and everyone else is incidental. They could easily have saved 30 minutes cutting back on a dozen Hritik slow motion struts and an equal number of, “wazir, haathi, ghoda, pyada” dialogues.
The film jarred at a number of places – be it forcing comedy and bromantic, flamenco music between in between fights. The unnecessary camera movements during the briefing scenes in the war room, with forced pan ins and outs and rotation shots with an extremely loud background music.
There are also silly things crammed into this movie that seems childish. Sample this, a person in the the control room struggles to hear commands in an in-ear headphone? The hero enters a cargo aeroplane without a drop in pressure, it is then immediately followed by a gun fight which depressurises the aircraft like hell. The car inside the cargo plane isn’t tied down with belts so that some nice stunts can be performed on it! Then in the climax, the hero’s drive off an Indian navy arctic exploration ship in top of the line Audi’s! They drive on the Arctic ice sheets right into a forest and then into house for the climactic take down of the villain! In case you doubt the silliness in the movie, the secret war room can be accessed by pressing 80085 in the lift. The problem was I was concentrating too hard trying to understand nuances in a movie which had none.
For all the credit being given to Hritik in for the success of this movie, it is Tiger who does the heavy lifting. Be it being staring lustfully at Hritik or doing all the jumping in set-piece action sequences or dancing harder or ripping off his shirt in the climax – he does it all, while Hritik gets all the slow-mo walks.
I was forced to watch WAR due to work related commitments. I wish, I didn’t have those commitments.
