Fighter Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi
It’s always a little worrisome, and slightly unsettling to see movie collections being celebrated more than the actual movie. It could be Pathan, Jawan, or even Barbie with that entirely made-up “Box Office Achievement” Golden Globe.
As a film critic you try to ignore it, until you watch a movie like Fighter, and realise how absolutely complete the commodification of Hindi cinema has become.
Let’s try to get into it.
Let’s take a look at Siddharth Anand’s Fighter, starring Deepika Padukone and Hrithik Roshan in the lead roles, now in movie theatres.
Whatever you need to know about Fighter, you’ve seen it in the trailer. I don’t exaggerate when I see it, the story is literally just that. In and of itself, that’s not a bad thing. The trailer for a thing can show you what the plot points are going to be and still manage to blow you away with its form and structure.
In an ideal world.
The world Fighter exists in, is what I call the Formless Film Field. A dimension covered in a faint mist in which structure, acts, conflict, journeys, and arcs loosely swirl around before vanishing wispily. It’s a parallel, simpler realm where there is little difference between Instagram reels specifically created for our ever-shrinking attention span and what counts as cinema. In this universe, one may not care for stories to be coherent, as long as they occupy as much space as popular culture will allow them. The Formless Film Field is filled with a frightening number of fan favorites, movie stars fawning all over each other, pretending to bring you big entertainment, but eventually only interested in the cartoonish money symbols flying around their viewers’ heads. Occasionally an Atlee comes along with Jawan, who staying in this field manages to utilize the 3 seconds at a time we are willing to give to anything visual now, to string together a semblance of a sustained screenplay with something to say. But for the most part “franchises” live in the the formless film field. Special zones are reserved for cop universe writers, action movie sequel think tanks and anyone remotely associated with a Marvel movie.
Fighter is no exception.
Get Sucharita Tyagi’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Hrithik Roshan is Shamsher Pathania aka Patty, Deepika Padukone is Minal Rathore, Minni. Along with a bunch of others, they are part of something called the Dragon Squad, under the boss-man-ship of Anil Kapoor as Rocky, whose default setting from scene 1 to last is….pissed off. I miss the days when the only thing one could fault the always reliable, and frankly stunning Anil Kapoor for, was his participation in the Race movies. That, over the last few months, has changed.
Some effort is made by Siddharth Anand and co-writer Ramon Chhib to give the characters a shade of realism. Patty has angst from an unfinished love story, Minal has a father who for some inexplicable reason doesn’t approve of her overachieving daughter only because she’s in the airforce, and Rocky has his own bone to pick with Patty, outside of their professional relationship. As far as I could tell, this is army veteran turn TV producer Ramon Chhib’s first feature film screenplay, toh it is giving JK Rowling and the later Fantastic Beasts movies.
All of the character work though is secondary, because danger looms closer and everyone will soon have no option but to come together as a team, India must win. One would think it’s a classic hero who has to surpass insurmountable odds to beat the bad guys, if not an underdog story then at least one with some unfair disadvantage to the good side. Except, the hyper-nationalist and jingoistic cinema of Bollywood as it stands in 2024 doesn’t quite BELIEVE in the David vs Goliath structure anymore. Hubris doesn’t quite allow our good guys to seem anything less than perfect; even when they make wrong decisions, somehow it’s still Pakistan’s fault. Nearly 4 years ago, when the Jahnvi Kapoor starrer Gunajn Saxena showed the gendered fault lines in the IAF, based on a real-life person’s very real story, the Indian Air Force wrote to the Censor Board alleging the film portrayed the institution in bad light. So now, when we show a woman in an all-male strike force, her main job is to fall in love with the main guy, dance in 3 Pathan-redux songs, and fly a chopper in one scene. There is no room for nuance, no one wants anyone’s feelings to be hurt.
Except the people from Pakistan. Fighter doesn’t care if Pakistani fans of Hindi cinema never watch another Hrithik Roshan movie again, for in this film everything wrong in the world is because of men who fly green fighter jets, with kajal in their eyes and say janaab, jaayaz, jung so much, it may as well be emblazoned on the side of said fighter planes as a battle cry. There is also baddie superlord Azhar Akhtar, the closest name one can find to Muslim Musalman I suppose. Played by Rishabh Sawhney, Azhar looks like Luke Kenny from Rock On and talks like Christian Bale from Batman Begins. We are told in the very first scene this guy is responsible for major bomb blasts around the world toh bio-data strong hai and hence should be allowed to have full control over the Pakistani army’s war decisions. No one questions him, and neither do we. He growls and scowls and your only expectation from this guy is, I hope he dies.
Fighter IS asking for blood, make no mistake. Valiant attempts are made by dialogue writer Abbas and Hussain Dalal, and perhaps Biswapati Sarkar who is credited with additional dialogue, to emphasize ki Islamophobic nahi hai film. “there should be no civilian causalities”, kyunki hamaari jung desh se nahi aatankwaadiyon se hai”, but the itty bitty subtility is lost under Patty claiming Kashmir for india by yelling “Maalik Hum Hain” proceeding to threaten an “India Occupied Pakistan” before screaming Jai Hind a couple of times. Another person says “rules se zyada zaroori jeet hai sir”, another says “ab jung hogi”. But lest the proceeding become too propaganda-adjacent 1 day before our Republic Day, editor Arif Sheikh quickly if haphazardly cuts away to a hyper sexy song sequence. It’s a treat for the eyes, like cheerleaders running on to a sports field with pom-poms before players rush at each other bloody-lustily again. Except Hrithik and Deepika are doing all the jobs. After the aesthetic respite, we return to regular programming with dialogue like “Unhe sabak sikhaana hai toh unki bhasha mein jawaab dena hoga”, reminding you ki kitna hindi cinema mein ab yeh sentiment echo hota hai. A far cry from Gandhi’s “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”. So yeah, Fighter isn’t a war movie, it’s a PRO war movie.
I found myself thinking, is it just me? Am I just so tired of the state of the world, the wars, death, destruction, and overall helplessness that stems from reading national and global news that’s provoking this reaction, or the lack of a reaction really? It’s kinda cool only na how they used real jets, and tarmacs and all to bring this to life. So I tried to look away from the warmongering for a bit. Only to find my attention focused on counting the number of times an Asian Paints billboard shows up. I wanna say 4, with a consolidated screen time of about 45 seconds. Well done MBA man who’s assignment this was, I hope you get a raise. Further in my attempt, I wondered why Hrithik Roshan’s Ray Bans say Ray Ban and Deepika’s don’t, I know hers are RayBan because I have the same pair. When Patty practices kickboxing on an HRX punching bag, does Hrithik Roshan make money or is the HRX branding a part of his overall deal for Fighter?
I said at the beginning of this sort of defeated review, Fighter is what happens when we completely commodify cinema, everyone is in service of the money the movie is expected to earn. “Cinema is a business after all” kehne waale, will be happy to see Fighter is nothing but business. If that’s good enough for you, go watch in a movie theatre. It thanks our current minister for information and broadcasting by name before it starts, so at least no letters will go to the censor board this time.
