A movie can be bad and a wildly entertaining watch, as is the case here War 2. The fight scenes are so impossible that the opening night audience was laughing at them, and yet we were all riveted in our seats delighting at how each pow-bam-boom spectacle kept upping the ante. The laws of physics went right out the window as our heroes drove cars off bridges onto moving trains, skydived to the top of a plane also in midair flight for some complex fight choreography, or leapt their speedboat through an active formula-one style motor race before leaping back into the water to continue the chase. When a movie tries so hard to amuse, how can one not enjoy it?
It would have been easier if the plot was smarter, of course. Kabir (Hrithik Roshan) is introduced taming a Yakuza guard-wolf with his pretty eyes before single-handledly massacring a bunch of Japanese baddies in a very cool swordfight that ends with a helicopter being blown up. He’s an assassin for hire, a dirty soldier turned mercenary, and after a mild kidnapping from a Berlin nightclub working exclusively for a baddie named Gulati (K. C. Shankar), who you know is really evil because he has a mullet. It transpires that Gulati is the Indian representative of an evil organisation called Kali, designed to undermine the great nation of India and provide a big lesson in patriotism to us all. Vikram (N. T. Rama Rao Jr, making his Hindi-language debut, a pretty big deal) is introduced being flown by drone onto a cargo ship controlled by Somalian pirates with neither weapons nor shirt in order to rescue some kidnapped sailors. His first order of business is obviously to kill the pirate DJ, put on some Indian rap and only then commence to slaughtering the baddies with a few belts full of hand grenades, machetes, sledgehammers, whatever is lying around. Vikram works for the secret Indian spy service the YRF Spy Universe of films has been built around, and right now their top priority is hunting down Kabir. And believe me, this is only the set-up.
The twists and turns of the plot, which are very silly and involve an uncomfortably high collateral bodycount, bring to mind the dilemma Hollywood audiences will be most familiar with from the Fast & Furious franchise: how do you hire actors to play villains when no one wants to be the bad guy? So Kabir must demonstrate his decency by having an adopted daughter named Ruhi (Arista Mehta), who is remarkably calm about being dangled from that car on the roof of the speeding train, and a tortured backstory with an Air Force pilot named Kavya (Kiara Advani, perfectly serviceable), who is currently working on the secret taskforce alongside Vikram.
Vikram’s backstory really shouldn’t be spoiled, although it can be observed that the scene in a Spanish food hall where Kabir and Vikram point their guns at each other under the table is like watching John Wayne and Montgomery Clift compare pistols in Rio Bravo all over again. The eventual mano-a-mano confrontation in the Swiss ice cave after the assassination attempt on the prime minister involves the fighters reduced to stabbing each other with icicles. And while it might be culturally insensitive of me to observe that this is QUITE the metaphor, it’s also played so straight it’s clear the subtext was very much not intended. Ahem.
And that’s a great shame. As these prime physical specimens strut around waving enormous weapons under their exceptional heads of hair (though the most magnificent barnet belongs to Anil Kapoor, who shows up from time to time either to make patriotic speeches or machine-gun entire biker gangs to death), there’s a very different and maybe even more entertaining movie so close you can touch it. And while it’s not fair to say movies about male friendship are really all that way inclined, you can’t tell me the sequence after the “nine months later” intertitle wouldn’t have been even better if they’d just decided to give up pretending. The previous movie in the YRF Spy Universe series, Pathaan, the finale of which involved the great Shah Rukh Khan in a fight to the death on top of a truck speeding through Dubai with a very scary terrorist with the unscary name of Jim, didn’t even think about not daring to speak its name. So the question War 2 doesn’t ask itself is whether the egos of all involved wrote some checks their movie couldn’t cash.
But where does it go from here? The mid-credits stinger of a young girl getting an arm tattoo to represent the name Alpha may well have Julia Ducournau, whose newest movie that premiered at this year’s Cannes is about just that, calling her lawyers. Is the end goal to eventually make enough movies about the same secret organisations all the superstars of Indian cinema will one day, idk, assemble? But if that is the case, shouldn’t writers Aditya Chopra, Shridhar Raghavan and Abbas Tyrewala and director Ayan Mukerji learn from the current state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that audiences prefer their movies to be good?
On the other hand, with the amount of galactic star power on display here, quality is pretty clearly the secondary concern. And whatever else you might say about War 2, you absolutely will be entertained. It just won’t be quite the way the filmmakers and the big huge stars intended.
War 2 is now in playing limited theaters.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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