I went to watch War with much excitement. Because of all the hype. Because it was all over social media that it has collected 100 crores in 3 days & how people were lining up in droves to watch this kick ass fare etc etc. Thats where i get all my news from – social media. Not from newspapers anymore
Since i dont watch TV I hadn’t seen the promos either- not even that entirely forgettable tune in that super cute Holi song where Hritik & Tiger move like …like… there is no word coined yet to describe their unbelievable grace & panther like energy. I actually googled this one & found that all Gods of seduction are actually Goddesses! ie female. Their male equivalents have not been coined yet. So, well lets just say where they move like well Hritik & Tiger. It cant get finer
#War starts off in typical mega masala Bollywood style. Outdated to the core with exaggerated intros of the hero’s in slowmo. Dust flying, lips twitching, muscles rippling. Lavish foreign locales & enough aerial shots to know the producers pockets are deeper than the ocean never mind the intelligence quotient. The usual archaic dialogue baazi intented to sound cool & daring & show the hero in close up glaring for no apparent reason that makes it all so boring. Yaaawwnnn
The story is the usual good guys in the army trying to catch the Islamic terrorist cliche and the good guy (Hritik) turning rogue & his pupil (Tiger) being assigned to find him trope. There are huge doses of very cliched depictions of Islamic (supposedly ISIS) savagery with stone bodied kohl smudged eyed cruel looking men stoning very helpless burqa clad women with foam rocks (the kind you get in art shops all over the world) . Alongside the super jingoistic army men who claim their love for their “Watan” in every sentence with such non stop insistence that the movie starts seeming like a punishment.
By the time you get to the gravity defying action scenes of Hritik jumping from one aircraft to the other, drilling holes & infiltrating a military aircraft mid flight with some cheap looking black hooks in his bare hands & then shooting all the “gaddaars” (read traitors) in Rambo fashion and then floating out of the aircraft in a jeep !!! etc etc – (I kid you not he actually floats out in a jeep after blowing up a military aircraft mid air & pulls his parachute rope with that beatific Hritik smile to land on a beach somewhere in Italy, in search of the main villain who is disguised as someone else with the help of plastic surgery ( there is is a long devious order of utterly predictable villains in the movie ) the film has plunged into such ridiculous depths you are no longer trying to understand the story. Just rolling your eyes in a wtf at Vaani shimmying & showing off her booty in all her glory.
By now the shock of dealing with the ludicrousness is so unbearable it takes over your senses and you have no choice but to order more popcorn and samosa . Some comfort is needed – carbohydrate hi sahi . The last few scenes are again a maze of utter nonsense, winding, twisting & culminating in the glorious cliched plot twist of a 150 yr old movie formula- feeding poison to kill the enemy !!! Of course you know the poison cannot work because Hindi film heroes are way above poison – especially the poorly researched first name found on the on the first page of google kind of poison .This is a cliche plot twist that Yash Raj writers seem unable to escape – remember the poison laddoo in Thugs of Hindostan? Well here in War since the setting is soooo international & veers blindly between vulgarly opulent foreign locales like Syria, Italy, Antartica blah blah the makers decided to be more sophisticated & added the poison to some cognac instead of the laddoo. Some cheap poison called Ddx or was it RDX? By now its all so dumb you do not even want to understand technical details. You just want to go home
But never mind the insult to ones intelligence. I would still recommend you go watch War- for Hritik and for Tiger. They are a feast to the eyes and as actors perform with all the earnestness & skill they possess. And do watch it in a PVR theatre that has installed the new D- Box seats too. Seats that throb & vibrate & shake & roll to give you a virtual experience. In fact i think it may even help one lose weight sitting on those new fancy D Box seats- I could feel some real bad ass wobbles with every beat.
As for the makers I would recommend they hire some real new age writers and script doctors. And watch some shows on Netflix and films like Uri
#War is outdated, poor story telling & a waste of great resources . Having money to spend & sell able faces does not make a good movie. And lying about box office figures in the media certainly does not make it a hit. There were only 3 people in the theatre besides me- one of whom had fallen asleep half way through the movie and started to snore loudly
Yaaawnn I’m sleepy too now… and jeez that samosa has given me some bad gas