So what’s this all about? Don’t try answering that question for curious quarters. I am still trying to figure out what War 2 is trying to say about rogue soldiers carrying on their private war to save the country.
By the time Anil Kapoor showed up in his now-on-now-off “serious” glasses and Kiara Advani in her bikini, I had caught on to the reassuring rhythms of director Ayan Mukerji’s storytelling: don’t think, just sink into the shadowy world of these aggressive soldiers….
Yeah, yeah, I know ‘shadowy’ and ‘aggressive’ are more moronic than oxymoronic. The urgent tone of narration warns us repeatedly not to try to make any sense of the plot. We soon surrender to the imminent interjection of sensory perceptions that the film unleashes with lip-smacking relish.
For sure, the action sequences are to die for. Each one of the main mayhem stoppages is at least fifteen minutes long. Hrithik Roshan at the start of the film gets a lengthier introduction than NTR Jr, who joins in much later (the former erasing a Japanese mafia with his one-man army tactics, the latter snuffing out Somalian pirates at sea).
But fans of NTR needn’t fret: there is plenty of him in this feast of fury. He is cocky and confident, and he speaks Hindi quite fluently. Hrithik Roshan continues to drawl dangerously: if you miss what he is saying, the world may end sooner than you think.
On this occasion, he shares more chemistry with young YouTuber Arista Mehta, who plays the orphaned daughter of a soldier whom Hrithik’s character Kabir has adopted. Together, the surrogate father and daughter give us the film’s best action sequence set in scenic Spain. It starts off in a small red car and ends on top of a speeding train—the car and the action–leaving the characters, and the audience, breathless.
The pacing is a bit of a problem. Whenever the action stops, the narration loses steam. We can almost smell the slide. The drama, for whatever it is worth, seems to have been written around the action sequences. Reminds me of Mahesh Bhatt’s Aashiqui where the songs came first, then the movie.
In that sense, we could label War 2 as the Aashiqui of the action genre. The locations chosen to shoot the stunts are worthy of being featured in the National Geographic. The dialogues (written by Abbas Tyrewala) are quite the plot boosters.
While the first half accrues a harvest of hefty action sequences, the second-half opens with a twenty-minute loo break when we are flashbacked into Kabir and Vikram’s teenaged truancy. The juvenile home is shown to be a place for an army officer (Ashutosh Rana, trying hard to look serious) to pick up potential recruits for the army.
Whoever thought of this brainwave deserves the National award for asininity. The climactic faceoff between the two wow heroes (that’s how war heroes sound when your mouth is full of yourself) is situated in an icy venue. Here, NTR welcomes Hrithik with the song ‘Yaari hai imaan mera’ from Zanjeer. Bachchan and Pran did an antagonists-converted-into-buddies act. In War 2, we are never sure which side Hrithik and NTR are on. What seems to have been designed as an arresting game of ambiguity eventually turns into a massive test of our patience.
As for the casting, the two leads play off against one another with the revved-up enthusiasm of two car racers who have lost track. Anil Kapoor tries to look involved. But finally, just like us, he just wants to go home. Kiara Advani is now officially the poor man’s Deepika Padukone.
Yash Raj Films’ favourite heroine, Vaani Kapoor, shows up in flesh (in a fleeting flashback), after showing up in spirit in their last release. In Saiyaara, the heroine was named Vaani.
One final question: was Ayan Mukerji the right person to direct this?
