Phantom for the mob opera
Phantom
Director: Kabir Khan
Actors: Saif Ali Khan, Katrina Kaif
Rating: **
Stepping out of the theatre in this film’s interval, an immediate sense you get is that all you’ve been watching thus far was actually an afterthought. We’re at the mid-point. This is when the “Rambo” type hero decides to penetrate Pakistan. You know that all along that must have been the whole point of this picture. Halfway through, the movie has only begun.
Until then Rambo shows off his prowess and generally earns street cred, firing guns among IS terrorists in Syria, killing off David Headley inside the prison, chasing cars, and basically shuttling between Chicago, London, Beirut, Amman, before he finally heads to Lahore.
This is a revenge drama, if you may. The lead character Daniyal Khan (Saif, with a botoxed forehead severely crunched between his eye brows), is an ex Indian army soldier, excommunicated from the Indian army since. He is recruited by the Indian spy agency RAW (Research & Analysis Wing) to, well: One by one, knock down each mastermind behind the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. To begin with, by infiltrating Lashkar-e-Toiba. By doing what exactly? Oh come on, I’ve only seen this film. How am I supposed to know?
You would totally get it if this was a video game. It should be. The firepower could suitably match the star-power of an animated hero in the middle of it all. The underlying politics would be easy to ignore. There’s firstly far more physical labour involved in recreating this script on the big screen.
And since this is a film, just consider for a sec how Daniyal gets David Headley, chief planner of the Mumbai attacks. Daniyal gets into Headley’s classified prison in Chicago as an under-trial murderer. At some point, having tracked Headley’s movements inside jail, he unscrews the overhead pipe supplying water for Headley’s morning shower. He poisons the water. Headley takes a shower with his mouth wide open. Headley dies. Hah!
You have to completely credit a masterly touch of director Kabir Khan (his last one was an Indo-Pak peacenik pic BajrangiBhaijaan) that this seemingly B-grade script spools out still as an acceptably A-grade movie, for whatever it’s worth. Sincerely apologies for laughing about Headley’s death up there. A double ha-ha for the fact that the filmmakers, I hear, were publicly upset for Pakistan having banned this movie.
Well they would ban Tom and Jerry if they had a chance to (Tom playing India obviously!). But this is absolutely the most notoriously anti Pak establishment film that I’ve ever seen come out of India. Which isn’t to say that our friendly neighbours couldn’t do with a dose of sanity. At this point Pakistan seems like a Third World country literally annihilating itself over third-rate conspiracy theories.
But this is mainly a movie that shows India punching beyond its weight. The Pak secret service agency ISI had similarly sponsored a film Waar (in 2013) taking the pants off RAW, which I haven’t seen yet. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if this film was similarly sponsored by the RAW itself. Not that there’s anything particularly unique by way of story here.I’m only curious to know when is it that the filmmakers sat in their drawing room before a drawing board and decided to go ahead with this operation.
Here’s what we’ve watched already. Saif as a spy travelling across the world, including Pakistan, was Agent Vinod (2012). For a while here, he turns rogue, like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015). But only very,very briefly.Cut to Katrina, or actually let’s not, since she’s in the war zone but still posing for Vogue. Kat was also a spy in Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger, as she is here (although what she’s really up to,is hard to tell).
The 26/11 incidentwas dealt with (however shoddily) in Ram Gopal Varma’s The Attacks Of 26/11 (2013). Audiences in my theatre saw touches of Akshay Kumar’s Holiday (2014): army-man on a one-man mission etc. But Akshay, like Saif, was the spy conducting surgical operations abroad for RAW in Baby (2015), trying to get to the same guy, Hafiz Saeed, or his lookalike, in Saudi Arabia. Oh but Phantom is in Pakistan. Well Nikhil Advani’s D-Day (2013) was again about getting into Pakistan and nabbing Dawood Ibrahim, the mastermind of the ’93 Mumbai terror attacks. And were they all inspired by Argo (2012)? Hard to tell. But you know what’s turned into a genre. I’ll tell you what I find worrying.
This script is based on the fictional novel Mumbai Avengers by S Hussain Zaidi, veteran crime journalist, who I’ve had the great fortune of working with in two of my past jobs. Zaidi wrote Black Friday, a fine piece of investigative journalism that was made into a stellar film by Anurag Kashyap that started with the line, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” It is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Most people don’t know this, but Gandhi never said those words. Screenwriter John Briley wrote them for the film Gandhi (1982). They are still very instructive works.
However thrilling parts of this picture may be (and the Pak portions are riveting), I felt slightly uncomfortable with people clapping and hooting around me, watching deaths of few individuals or masterminds, as it were; as if such killings can quite simply avenge the massacre of 166 people on 26/11/08. I’m sorry, but you do begin to feel a bit queasy hearing such collective bloodthirsty outbursts in a dark hall. This movie has been made for that response and that mob alone.