120 Bahadur Review:
A day before the release of 120 Bahadur, its lead actor and producer, Farhan Akhtar, said during a social media live session that the film is his version of Lakshya 2. He might just be executing a PR advice, but as a fan of the 2004 film and having sat through 120 Bahadur, this sounded like a grave overreach. Lakshya might be “the film” for Army aspirants, but I never saw it purely as a war film. For me, it was always a coming-of-age drama, a story of a slacker who ultimately finds a purpose. It just so happens that he finds it in the Army. It was a novel way of telling a story, one which could have become another nationalistic melodrama. 120 Bahadur is what Lakshya refused to reduce itself to. It’s so by the book that it feels like a manual on how to make war films. Watching it is like listening to a battle story from your grandfather who heard it from his ex-army friend. It seems generic and is told without any feeling or conviction. Like a second-hand experience.
Cast: Farhan Akhtar, Raashii Khanna, Vivan Bhatena and Ankit Siwach
Directed by: Razneesh Ghai
Written by: Rajiv G. Menon
The film revolves around Major Shaitan Singh Bhati and his 120 bravehearts of the Charlie Company, the 13th Battalion of the Kumaon Regiment, who sacrificed their lives for the sake of the motherland in the Battle of Rezang La, fought during the 1962 India-China war. It, however, doesn’t go beyond reverence to explore who these soldiers were beneath the uniform. If you have seen enough historicals, you know how predictably things are going to proceed if the film starts with monochrome news reels. Here, we see India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, meeting the Chinese Premier. It is the era of ‘Hindi-chini bhai bhai’ (India-China brotherhood), but Amitabh Bachchan’s baritone, in a voiceover, will soon inform us how the neighbouring country did a ‘vishwasghaat’ (betrayal). Before you can soak in the sheer unimaginativeness of this sequence, we jump into another trope, of an injured, disoriented soldier, the last survivor of a battle, finding his way into an Army hospital to tell the story of the sacrifice of the country’s sons.
The film’s hero is also introduced in a typical Hindi film fashion. Characters talk about him first among themselves, building up his myth (“Hmm, Major Shaitan Singh Bhati”). The save-the-cat scene of Farhan’s Shaitan is less about saving and more about putting himself at risk. Without flinching, he walks into an enemy sniper’s range of fire in order to expose his location. Surprisingly, the enemy also shoots only as a warning, as if it knows that killing the hero at this point in the film might just derail the whole narrative. It also seems like a risky military strategy that no Army officer will either endorse or execute. The soldiers of the Charlie Company he is going to lead are also a bland bunch. Their mannerisms often seem to blend into each other. Their playful bantering and bonhomie didn’t feel natural, as if it was being employed only to manufacture chemistry. It all feels synthetic, and the characters often seem like they are delivering lines in a street play. The whole film too suffers from this artificiality. An obviously evil-looking Chinese officer is about to kill an Indian prisoner of war, but the latter won’t die before saying ‘Bharat mata ki jai’ into the camera. 120 Bahadur, however, doesn’t seem convinced of the product it is selling. Hence, it uses the most done-to-death storytelling devices, like if a soldier suddenly starts talking about his family back home, you know that he will be martyred in the next scene.
It often seems like 120 Bahadur is tick-marking the requirements of a war film. The soldiers will sing, while sitting around a bonfire, about their families back home in full ‘Sandese aate hain’ vibes. The most brooding of them will be the first one to sacrifice his life, the most endearing one will be the next. The characters can’t go beyond being cardboard cutouts. Farhan’s Shaitan also doesn’t have any other dimension to him, except that he can always think ahead of the enemy. The actor plays the character with equal ease and strain. He shines in silences, but the performance shows cracks in the scenes, which demand that Farhan be an authoritative and blaring army general.
When I saw the film’s trailer, I was impressed with the slick action and the scale it promised. But while watching the movie, since the emotion was weak, the war scenes lacked propulsion. The combat sequences are varied. There are gunfights, hand-to-hand, and numerous explosions, but ultimately, it starts feeling like one battle after another. It also seems like the film is a way for the makers to take a sip from the stream of war films that have been inundating the Hindi cinemascape for quite a while. What it lacks is conviction in its vision. The good thing is that 120 Bahadur is not incendiary or propagandist. Its purpose is to only love the country and those who protect it, and not hate the other. For a change, the enemy is not bad old Pakistan but a scheming China. The film is not divisive, but it sure is dull. Frankly, I don’t know which is worse.