
Shamsher Pathania fulfills his lifelong dream and becomes a member of the Indian air force. As he faces rigorous challenges, Patty must rise above his own limitations to become a true hero.
It’s Tom Cruise’s world and Fighter (2024) is just crawling in it. Director Siddharth Anand’s latest adapts everything Cruise’s Top Gun franchise is famous for – pulsating action, hyper-masculinity, homoeroticism, narrative swag, warmongering – and makes it inferior. The action is good, but not good enough to distract from the film’s political demons; the urgency of aerial combat is often punctured by elaborate ‘dialogue-baazi’ from the cockpit.
The hyper-masculinity and homoeroticism have Hrithik Roshan to lean on. But the sexual tension he shares with the air plays second fiddle to the textual tension between this film and the India it unfolds in. The narrative swag is compromised by the film’s timing. Its sense of fiction is suspended between the writing of history and the rewriting of it – the Balakot airstrike of 2019 is given the Uri: The Surgical Strike treatment, where two sides of the coin are ‘India wins’ and ‘Pakistan loses’ (the third side is ‘Pakistan loses again’). The warmongering, too, keeps contradicting itself. The film insists that its battle is with nationless terrorists and not with the Pakistani people, but threats that use phrases like “India-occupied Pakistan” prove that this distinction is flimsy at best.
Fighter stars Roshan as squadron leader Shamsher “Patty” Pathania, a top Indian Air Force (IAF) pilot who turns narcissism into a Bollywood aesthetic. This man is no vegetarian patty. He loves showboating, much to the chagrin of his commanding officer Rakesh “Rocky” Jaisingh (Anil Kapoor).
He fails training exercises like a maverick who – as Rocky perceptively explains – is so gifted that he tends to become a danger in a team of mere mortals. He also struts around the base with a mysterious smirk, like most handsome heroes with a tragic past do. We know this because helicopter pro Minal “Minni” Rathore (Deepika Padukone) is curious about him. Fortunately for her, every other aviator on the team – including Taj (Karan Singh Grover) and Bash (Akshay Oberoi) – offers information on the urban legend that is Patty. They speak about him like he’s not there. They think about him like he’s everywhere. You know the drill
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