Siddharth Anand's artistry bespeaks an upbringing filled with GI Joes, plastic combat boots and plastic bayonets, fake punching noises and fake sounds of gunshots, rudely interrupted by an adult voice saying, 'Beta, all this is good, but try bringing in some feelings too', observes Sreehari Nair.
In Siddharth Anand's Fighter, the distance between a terrorist attack and a clubbing night is made so short that it becomes an innocent demonstration of Blood on the Dance Floor.
In the director's latest attempt at action-cinema-for-jocks, we see Hrithik Roshan's Patty and his crack team of fighter pilots witnessing firsthand the scenes following the blowing up of a CRPF convoy in Pulwama.
There's cacophony, there's gore, a procession of charred faces, and limbs saying their final goodbyes.
We can tell that we are being carefully stage-managed.
Nevertheless, the good melodrama-loving people that we are, we may still wish to keep drinking from the goblet of shameless exploitation.
But before we can allow our hearts to be properly cleaved, we find that Patty and his crack team have taught the 'Jaish' some valuable lessons in humility, and next thing we know they are shaking their tushes and clawing their hands, and singing this year's anthem of the tabletop lion.
To put it succinctly, Caged Shers are set free, and the martyrdom of those CRPF personnel is all but forgotten.
Now, it's true that the average Indian moviegoer is used to being insulated from history this way.
In fact, it can be argued that the average Indian lives for the opportunity to show his love for his country and have some fun while doing it.
On a wintry evening about a year ago, I saw from the stands at Attari-Wagah a little girl who had just lost her milk tooth, a young lady who had barely reached the matrimonial site age, and an 80-something-old grandam with arthritic legs take turns to run up and down a marching path, flag in hand, even as the music alternated between Sabse Aagey Honge Hindustani, Koi Kahe Kehta Rahe and Lehrado.
Two rows below mine, a sweater-clad uncle was doing some jittery dance steps, a sight that was enough to quell the last vapours of Radcliffe and Mountbatten and Jinnah.
Insulating ourselves from history may be our number one national pastime and yet, Fighter moves so rapidly from mourning to glory to jollification that it gives us a bad conscience.
Siddharth Anand's movies often do an efficient job of blending impersonal razzmatazz and conventional mush.
In this case, however, the blend is so haphazardly achieved that it feels like an 'unholy mix', a token of Anand's insensitivity and his swindling.
It's not just the slapdash transition from the horrors of Pulwama to the stringing up of the party lights that vex you; the whole movie is saturated with that spirit of Blood on the Dance Floor.
So there's Anil Kapoor's Rocky, who blames his sister's death on Patty and his fondness for unnecessary aerial showmanship.
We trust Rocky's exasperation because, like a good soldier, he wears it straight.
Now, most of us would consider this to be a great setting for some serious tension between two bullheads. But once the discotheque is decked up, even Rocky is forced to comply with the schedule. So he wipes the scowl off his face and joins Patty and his team in the hip-swiveling routine.
I mean, come on, old boy, I thought that scowl was worth something.
There's Deepika Padukone's Minni, who impresses Patty by reciting couplets that expose her conservative parents and their unwillingness to let their daughter join the Indian Air Force.
In the first place, the recitations do sound like sad versions of that ham-handed My Choice commercial that Padukone had done in 2015.
And then, this self-same character, out to forge her destiny on her own terms, is shown dropping all pretenses of personality every time she catches a whiff of Hrithik Roshan's Patty (for the record, Padukone has been playing the hunk-ogler with such regularity that her eyes now appear permanently slanted).
Minni melts oh-so-easily at the sight of Patty that you realise she sees 'denunciation of patriarchy' as nothing more than an ice-breaker, a conversation starter, a surefire way of scoring a date.
There's an old joke about Hollywood spy movies.
The joke has it that the leads in such movies may be hanging from a cliff while trying to save the world but they'll still find the time to share a passionate kiss.
Fighter offers a variation on the joke, only it keeps you from laughing; for it hops so callously from grand ideals, time-hardened grief and national catastrophes to the next avenue for fun and games that even within the bounds of manipulation, you might feel oddly cheated.
Siddharth Anand's artistry bespeaks an upbringing filled with GI Joes, plastic combat boots and plastic bayonets, fake punching noises and fake sounds of gunshots, rudely interrupted by an adult voice saying, 'Beta, all this is good, but try bringing in some feelings too.'
Anand's GI Joes may have acquired real-life dimensions but I don't think he can to this day, feel his way into a scene. He's a technocrat who so privileges his machines that it's tough for him to get a friendly banter going on the screen.
In Fighter, the deadly ribbing and wisecracking that happens between members of Patty's team might make you wonder if their lame jokes wouldn't be enough to debilitate those Pakistanis.
In the second half, when Patty says that he misses the camaraderie of his old crack team, you ask yourself, 'What is he missing exactly?'
T S Eliot had once posited that the emotions in Hamlet lacked an 'objective correlative', that is to say, the action in the play does not account for its big speeches. Though I hate to waste that genius piece of criticism on Fighter, I think it fits.
That being said, Hrithik does his best to hold the film together, if only by telling his team members that their punchlines aren't funny.
The fact that he emerges from Fighter unscathed is evidence that Hrithik Roshan is in the form of his life.
Siddharth Anand has modelled the character of Patty on those plastic figurines from his childhood.
In the hands of a lesser actor, Patty would have come off as one of those know-it-all, will-do-it-my-way types capable of wearing you out. But Hrithik has so mastered the art of letting the camera feast on him, has pared down his style so much, that he ends up giving cockiness a good name.
