The Taj Hotel Mumbai Movie

[Niklas Terki]

HotelMumbai is a 2018 independent action thriller film[4][5][6] directed by Anthony Maras and co-written by Maras and John Collee. An Indian-Australian-American co-production, it is inspired by the 2009 documentary Surviving Mumbai[7][8] about the 2008 Mumbai attacks at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in India. The film stars Dev Patel, Armie Hammer, Nazanin Boniadi, Anupam Kher, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Jason Isaacs, Suhail Nayyar, Nagesh Bhosle, and Natasha Liu Bordizzo.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2018, and had its Australian premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival on 10 October 2018. The film was released in Australia and the United States on 14 and 22 March 2019, respectively, and in India on 29 November 2019.

On 26 November 2008, waiter Arjun reports for work at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, India, under head chef Hemant Oberoi. The day's guests include British-Iranian heiress Zahra Kashani[9] and her American husband David, with their infant son Cameron and his nanny Sally, as well as ex-Spetznaz operative Vasili.

That night, terrorists from the Lashkar-e-Taiba organization, under the command of "the Bull", launch a coordinated assault against 12 locations across Mumbai, including the hotel. As the local police are not properly trained or equipped to handle the attack, they are forced to wait for reinforcements from New Delhi. In the ensuing chaos, Arjun, David, Zahra and Vasili are trapped in the hotel restaurant with several other guests while Sally remains with Cameron in their hotel room. A woman fleeing from the terrorists enters the hotel room, and Sally hides with Cameron in a closet as the terrorists shoot the woman and then leave.

Hearing of Sally's close encounter, David manages to sneak past the terrorists and successfully reach Sally and Cameron. Meanwhile, Arjun escorts the other guests to the Chambers Lounge, an exclusive club hidden within the hotel, where they hope to remain safe. David, Sally and Cameron attempt to regroup with the others, but David is captured and bound by the terrorists while Sally and Cameron are trapped inside a closet.

Meanwhile, police officer DC Vam and his partner enter the hotel in the hopes of reaching the security room so they can track the terrorists' movements. Inside, Arjun attempts to escort a mortally wounded guest to a hospital, but upon encountering the officers, she panics and flees before being killed by a terrorist. Arjun escorts the officers to the security room where they discover the terrorists about to break into the Chambers Lounge. Vam orders Arjun to stay as he goes to attack the terrorists, successfully wounding one named Imran.

Against Oberoi's advice, Zahra and Vasili, along with several other guests, decide to leave the lounge to escape, but Zahra and Vasili are caught and taken hostage along with David, while the others are killed in their attempt to escape.

While guarding the hostages, Imran contacts his family members, and reveals that the terrorists left to attack Mumbai under the guise of military training. He also discovers that while the Bull had promised to pay the families of the terrorists, they have yet to receive any money from him.

Eventually, the NSG arrive, and the Bull orders the terrorists to burn the hotel down. The terrorists leave Imran to guard the hostages, and the Bull orders Imran to kill them. Imran shoots both David and Vasili, but spares Zahra against the Bull's orders when she begins reciting a Muslim prayer, allowing her to untie herself and escape.

Arjun regroups with Oberoi and evacuates the remaining guests, encountering Sally and Cameron in the process. The NSG kill the remaining terrorists, and Zahra is evacuated by an aerial work platform before reuniting with Sally and Cameron. After the hotel is secured, Arjun returns home to his wife and daughter.

A closing script reveals that those responsible for the attack remain free to this day, but the hotel was repaired and parts reopened within months of the event. The final scenes show a memorial to the staff and guests, and footage of the grand reopening of the hotel.

On 11 February 2016, it was announced that Dev Patel and Armie Hammer had been cast in the film, along with actors Nazanin Boniadi, Teresa Palmer, and Suhail Nayyar, while Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Anupam Kher were in negotiations; Palmer and Coster-Waldau ultimately were not involved.[10] John Collee and Anthony Maras wrote the screenplay, which Maras directed, while Basil Iwanyk produced the film through Thunder Road Pictures along with Jomon Thomas from Xeitgeist, Arclight Films' Gary Hamilton and Mike Gabrawy, Electric Pictures' Andrew Ogilvie, and Julie Ryan.[10]

In June, Tilda Cobham-Hervey joined the cast[11] after Teresa Palmer pulled out early into her second pregnancy,[12] and in August, Jason Isaacs was cast.[13] On 7 September 2016, Natasha Liu Bordizzo joined the film to play Bree, a tourist caught in the attack.[14]

In May 2016, the Weinstein Company acquired US and UK distribution rights to the film.[18] However, in April 2018, it was announced that the Weinstein Company would no longer distribute the film.[19] In August 2018, Bleecker Street and ShivHans Pictures acquired US distribution rights to the film.[20]

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2018.[21] It was theatrically released in Australia on 14 March 2019, by Icon Film Distribution,[22] and the United States on 22 March 2019.[23] It was scheduled for a United Kingdom release in September 2019, by Sky Cinema and NowTV. Sky Cinema promoting it as a "Sky Cinema Original" in the United Kingdom.[24]

Netflix was set to distribute the film in India and other South and Southeast Asian territories.[26] However, Netflix later dropped the film, after a contractual dispute arose with Indian distributor Plus Holdings.[27] The film was scheduled to be released theatrically in India on 29 November 2019 by Zee Studios and Purpose Entertainment.[28] An official trailer of the film in Hindi was released by Zee Studios on 23 October 2019.[29]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 76% based on 215 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, "Its depiction of real-life horror will strike some as exploitative, but Hotel Mumbai remains a well-made dramatization of tragic events."[32] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 62 out of 100, based on 33 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[33] Audiences polled by PostTrak gave the film an overall positive score of 77% and a 50% "definite recommend".[31]

Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "Maras does an excellent job on such an ambitious first feature, covering every corner of the hotel and making each gunshot or explosion feel like the real thing. The level of verisimilitude is so high that when Maras cuts in actual documentary footage, it's hard to tell it apart from the fiction. As close to reality as a movie can be."[37] Anne Cohen of Refinery29 wrote: "Anthony Maras' harrowing feature debut depicting the 2008 Mumbai attacks transcends those tired tropes to deliver one of most breathlessly stressful, emotional and insightful depictions of terrorism and its victims I've ever seen."[38]

Jeff Sneider of Collider wrote: "Australian filmmaker Anthony Maras announces himself as a major director to watch with his feature debut Hotel Mumbai. It's a true ensemble piece, with a standout performance from Bollywood legend Anupam Kher, who registers strongest as the hotel's Chef and de facto leader of the hostages."[39] David Ehrlich of IndieWire wrote: "Dev Patel and Armie Hammer star in a lucid, humane, and almost unwatchably harrowing drama about the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks."[40]

A single moment approaches true serenity in the boilerplate true-terror thriller Hotel Mumbai. The movie depicts the 2008 terror attacks on the Indian city, some of which centered on a standoff at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. I remember the attacks; the smoke billowing from the hotel, the survivors clamoring through broken windows to escape to the ground, several floors below. The movie undertakes to present, in excruciating detail, the day's violence.

As Hotel Mumbai premieres, we are one week out from a massacre in two New Zealand mosques, a country where this film won't be screened for some time, to prevent collective post-traumatic stress. It's understandable. Hotel Mumbai is a painful watch, one that plunges its viewers into grisly moments of death and terror. It's an exploitation movie that feels truly exploitative, ripped from the headlines of the past decade and unconcerned with the deaths of many of its non-white victims (more on that later). It goes on and on; at two hours, its relentlessly consistent violence becomes unbearable.

While Hotel Mumbai delivers white-knuckle tension, it's of a kind that feels shrewdly calculated, like that of a video game. Everything just seems sort of ... cruelly perfect. As soon as a group of hotel guests shuffle through a door, a gunman wanders through the frame in the background, narrowly missing his prey. In another scene, a woman hides in a closet while a gunman patrols outside. For a moment, the gunman's eyes wander over the elaborately grated door that shields her, but he misses her. She covers the mouth of the baby she's carrying to keep it from crying out, and in the moment, it's impossible not to think of it as a sort of game-level objective: Keep the baby quiet for as long as possible, and survive. In such a harrowing context, the film's presentation comes off as cold and inhumane.

Imran is unique in this aspect, however. Otherwise, characters serve as mere plot functions; this effect is most pronounced among the hotel staff, led by a chef played by Bollywood legend Anupam Kher, who perform their duties in the face of danger with a telegraphed grace and dignity that may be historically accurate but that lacks cinematic truth.

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