Just about uplifting enough…
Airlift
Director: Raja Menon
Actors: Akshay Kumar, Nimrat Kaur
Rating: ***
The reality (or tragedy if you may, although I wouldn’t go so far to say) with a very realistic film that is also in the mainstream commercial Hindi space is that while professing your love for it, you have to simultaneously concede that it is after all a ‘Bollywood’ movie.
The truth about movies starring Akshay Kumar, or Salman Khan (Ek Tha Tiger, Bajrangi Bhaijaan) for that matter, who’ve spent their entire careers delivering what their core fan-base really wants, is that anything they do thereafter, which makes a lot of sense on screen, floors you completely.
And for good reason. It means a whole lot of good for mainstream movies in general. Airlift is not an exception.
Besides its annual general report, the only other document that the Coca Cola Company produces annually is the Limca Book of Records. Most Indian quiz buffs have grown up on it—reading about desi achievements that might embarrass most (longest nail, lengthiest moustache etc).
The one entry in it in 1991 that was remarkable in a real sense, and I’m told it made it to the Guinness book as well, concerned the evacuation of 1,70,000 Indians from Kuwait in 1990.
This operation was genuinely phenomenal because of the distance and lack of communication involved. The government took fair credit for it. IK Gujral (later the Prime Minister) was the external affairs minister. Air India got a pat on its back globally for the number of sorties (488 flights) it had to undertake to transport the massive number of mostly labourers stranded in foreign soil, once working as underlings during the oil boom, now forced to flee, because Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces had invaded Kuwait.
The logistics would have involved another crucial fact. Given the situation, how do you even organise over a lakh and half people into one place before they can board a flight? Not much is known about that.
There were apparently two Good Samaritans who took a personal initiative. This film merges both the characters into the leading man, played by Akshay Kumar, a modern-day Oscar Schindler, determined to help for the sake of humanity, before anything else.
To think of it, Airlift is the least dramatic of Akshay Kumar’s movies. The bravado is implicit. Much of his role is in the writing of it. To be fair, he underplays it in ways that you don’t always expect him to. This is a huge plus. And to give it to him, lately he’s been attempting to push the envelope (Baby, Special 26) far more than most of his ageing contemporaries, notably Shah Rukh Khan (Happy New Year, Dilwale).
Akshay plays Ranjeet, a cutthroat Punjabi businessman who takes it upon himself to first help out his employees, and gradually the entire non-resident Indian community, caring for their safety far more than his own, or his family’s.
What makes ordinary, selfish men to embrace greatness like this? It’s hard to say. Frankly you wish the film had delved on this aspect of the lead character better. Much of his newfound heroism is implied. His wife (Nimrat Kaur, totally wasted) does the talking, once.
Ranjeet negotiates with an Iraqi military officer (a character thoroughly destroyed by an Andheri actor mimicking terrible Hindi). On the other end, in Delhi, is another fine gent, a low level bureaucrat, who means well, but is tied down by general red tape and chain of command.
This fellow (absolutely the finest actor in the lot) is called Sanjeev Kohli. Kohli Saab incidentally is Joint Secretary (which is a very high-up IAS position) in the foreign ministry, although he sits around like an under-secretary or section officer—a low level clerk. I’m sorry this kind of poor research in a supposedly realistic pic only reminds you of Bollywood movies where the second-rate inspector ran a whole city.
The filmmakers however make up for all of it, shooting the Gulf crisis, Kuwait, the Iraqi invasion, and the evacuation, with utmost respect for detailing and the audience’s IQ. Production design is top-notch. Camera-work is kickass for the most part. The tragedy looks real. The money, none of which would have been possible if Akshay Kumar wasn’t in it, seems well spent.
Yeah I know, this had the potential to be Hotel Rwanda. But let’s not quibble much; for now, this will do—a very, very watchable Bollywood film.
Mayank Shekhar’s book NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING (Stuff about India and pop-culture that make me go, ‘You’re kidding me!’) is available online and at leading bookstores