Runtime: 167 minutes
Directed by: Siddharth Anand
Starring: Hrithik Roshan, Deepika Padukone, Anil Kapoor, Karan Singh Grover, Akshay Oberoi
From: Several different Hindi companies
“A Hindi version of Top Gun” wasn’t as spectacular as it could have been—but was still fine to me. Its presence on Netflix and discussion of the film earlier in the year on a messageboard I frequent dictated my pressing “play” on a movie almost 3 hours long last night.
Appropriately, Fighter is incredibly jingoistic; tensions rise between India & Pakistan. I realize that the two countries have a rather frosty relationship—needless to say, Pakistan is not portrayed with any nuance as their depiction is “we harbor terrorists and in fact we let a major terrorist w/ one red eye and who resembles a Brundlefly version of Anton Chigurh and Michael Jackson (to steal a quote) and for some reason this dude dictates our policy with India.” Meanwhile, we follow a group of students in the country’s version of Top Gun; this world’s version of Maverick is even more of a loose cannon who has great talent but has difficulty working w/ others and following the orders of superiors.
The movie’s middling reputation among film fans around the world is understandable; the plot is not the most complex, not all the humor landed, there were a few contrivances that caused me to roll my eyes, the song and dance numbers aren’t the best although they were still decent to me, a dumb white American. Large swarths of the CG also looked straight out of a video game; all those points aside, I was still entertained by the cliches, the melodrama, the OOT action scenes. Nonsense, but fun nonsense. To steal another quote, despite the presence of real-life tensions between bordering nations, the movie isn’t always… GROUNDED in reality.
My Netflix account will be paused for a month; I’ll subscribe to Peacock for a month for Olympics coverage and other programming that isn’t related to film. I was happy to view a South Asian movie last night, not just because a surprising number of Letterboxd mutuals are from that part of the world. Hopefully it won’t be too long before my return to this part of the world occurs…
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