"Your country comes first, second, and last."
Hello everyone!
Because Netflix just put the sequel to tonight's movie choice up on its streaming services, and you KNOW I'm going to be watching!
Mostly because of it's male lead.
Listen ... this isn't me, this is just how it goes. If Hrithik Roshan releases a new movie, you generally run along to watch it, if only to see whether or not the opening sequence has somehow changed from all the others he's done in the past thirty or so years.
But we're also headed back to the spyverse tonight, the one YRF has been building slowly but surely since the early 2010s, so it goes back a bit.
And there's also a female-led movie that's coming at the end of this year, so buckle up!
Because for now, we're headed into WAR.
WAR opens with - you guessed it - a shot of Roshan's eyes. He's perched behind a sniper rifle, he's playing a RAW agent (and it does look like the tile of this movie is purposefully made to read backwards), and he's not where he's supposed to be.
See, he's SUPPOSED to be somewhere in the Middle East shooting one of India's enemies, but he's ACTUALLY in India, and he shoots his overseer instead.
News goes high and wide by morning afterwards: Kabir, RAW's top agent, has gone rogue.
They now assemble a team to try and catch him - and take him off the board - that includes his former team, while they're at it, and most of them are his students. Taking point is Khalid, played by Tiger Shroff, who does a really good stupefied expression but unfortunately nothing else. Still, he was Kabir's star student, so he's the one tasked with chasing him down.
The movie's set in split timelines so you have to follow closely, because before we can figure out why the hell someone like Kabir's now shooting top Indian officials, we have to go back and learn how Khalid landed on his team to begin with.
See, Khalid is Muslim, and his father was a traitor. The kind of traitor that had his own wife denounce him to the authorities, and who eventually got taken off the board by none other than Kabir himself. Now, for some masochistic reason of his own, Khalid wants onto Kabir's team, which is initially a HELL NO from the master - of whom we finally get a full frontal shot as he unloads off a chopper after a successful mission.
But he's persuaded to give it a go by his CO, Colonel Luthra, so he's like, you know what, I put a bullet in your old man's eyes, both of them just to be sure, now I'm gonna see what I can do with you, but know that's your fate if you mess with me.
Ain't nobody the life of the party like Kabir, I'm telling you.
Anyway, the whole purpose behind Kabir's entire existence is to hunt and find India's Undesirable Number One, Riswan Ilyasi, who's behind almost all big anti-India attacks in the last ten-ish years, but he's also somehow managed to slip through the cracks every single time. To get to him, they have to go after a middleman first, so they do, and this middleman is some sort of indestructible giant; the sequence of Khalid and Kabir trying to take him down is probably the funniest I've watched in a while as they keep bouncing off him like he's a stone wall.
They manage - eventually, with a lot of bruises - and Kabir also tells Khalid in the aftermath that he knows about his one weakness (which apparently no one else managed to suss out in his entire military career thus far, somehow, not even during physical tests): he's got a blind spot in his right eye, which automatically eliminates him from Kabir's elite team.
Still, the kid fights for it, and Kabir's like alright, fine, just always keep someone on your right side, and you're gucci.
The middleman game flushes out Ilyasi, so the team head off to Malta, where shit literally goes straight to hell, not even in a hand basket: because they've got a traitor.
And it's not Khalid.
It's Saurabh, one of Kabir's OLDER team mates, which naturally breaks his heart, but as the mission falls apart, they at least recover a heavily wounded Khalid, and Ilyasi's gone.
In present day, Kabir takes out yet another high profile target, making it look absurdly easy, and Khalid's no closer to catching him than he was at the beginning of the movie. They do, however, have a heart-to-heart on the subway, and Kabir gives out the name of his next target, which of course would make you think it'd be more difficult for him to get to the doctor who has a disk that everyone wants, but no.
Obviously, he's a master act all on his own, no matter how fast Khalid runs or how well he drives a motorcycle, he's still not ready to give EVERYTHING to whatever cause he's fighting for, because only someone who's all in will rappel off a bridge with a rope that he doesn't know the length of.
By now, Khalid gets suspended, because hello, he's had Kabir in his sight at least twice to RAW's knowledge - but he's not done yet.
While he's ruminating, we go back into the past AGAIN, because after getting a heartwarming scene of Kabir with a little girl named Ruhi, teaching her an important life lesson about winning and losing, we figure out who the heck she even is.
After the failed Malta op, he's hell-bent on finding Ilyasi even more, and has been cultivating a supposed relationship with this dancer, Naina, who's had a rich guy chasing after her since forever. Said rich guy, however, is somehow laundering money for Ilyasi, and while surveying him, Kabir learns of the existence of four "chess" pieces that ensure Ilyasi will never be caught, high up in the government, the military, you name it: Rook, Knight, Bishop, Pawn.
He also learns something else; his hacker, Aditi, uncovers the chilling truth behind this rich money launderer.
He's got an elite plastic surgeon on speeddial.
He's actually Ilyasi with a new face.
By the time he figures THAT out, however, Naina's already dead, and it all happened so fast that Kabir knows there has to be a leak somewhere; so he calls Aditi, telling her the only one who knew what he was up to was the Colonel, to look into him, and who he was talking to. Because at that point, until he figures out who the four pieces are, he can trust absolutely no one.
And that's why he's taken out that overseer of his, the high-ranking military guy, and the scientist who gave him the disk. They were all on Ilyasi's payroll. He's now hunting down the Pawn.
By now, Khalid FINALLY catches up to the plot, and to Kabir, finding him through Ruhi - Naina's daughter, who Kabir's now looking after seeing as he was the one who got her mom killed. Kabir lays it all out, how deep this treachery goes, realizes his student is an idiot travelling under his own name so he led other RAW forces straight to them, and they hightail it out of there.
They make straight for Aditi's wedding, where she gives Kabir the disk that she finally cracked: it's Brahma's codes, codes for the defense satellite India has in place to communicate over no man's land where no other communications work. If that goes down, then the country as a whole is exposed, and anyone could just walk in.
Kabir gives the disk to Khalid, and after Aditi and Khalid argue over who gets to elope with their boss first, they head out again, where we're in for yet another surprise.
Khalid poisons Kabir's drink - because it's not Khalid.
It's Saurabh, wearing Khalid's face. Poor Khalid died back on Malta and hasn't been seen since.
But even as Saurabh and Ilyasi think they've won and fire off a missile towards the satellite, a supposedly dead Kabir parachutes down onto their ship, to tell them a story of his own:
he knew all about Khalid not being Khalid. Khalid had that blind spot on his right - but the night that RAW came for them, he could suddenly see perfectly, and Kabir knew something was up. Aditi confirmed that Khalid went back to HQ for something, a vial of poison went missing, and oh, Kabir prepped.
He took an antidote - confirmed Khalid wasn't Khalid when he drank alcohol - and put a tracker into the disk, because really, this "Khalid" was a small fish, and unimportant. He wanted Ilyasi all along.
Poor Ilyasi croaks on the spot, and then it's off to the races after Aditi changes the missile's direction back to the launch pad, because Kabir isn't letting his scheming former teammate go this time around. So they race across the ice like extras in the Fast and Furious franchise, end up in a church in the middle of nowhere, and decide to do some redecorating.
After Saurabh rearranges all the support pillars in there with Kabir's head, tides turn, and Kabir proves why the hell he's the best when he quite literally drops the entire thing down onto his enemy, making sure that he's buried WITHOUT the face he chose to wear.
Then he walks off into the sunset, deciding to stay rogue so he can get the job done faster and easier, although Luthra now knows what's what at least; Khalid gets awarded posthumously, and little Ruhi gets to finally surf in Australia, not with her mom, but with her father figure who decided he's gonna have someone to go home to now.
Slick, sharp, and to the point, WAR is full of hilarious inserts and heart-stopping action sequences, but I have to say it falters slightly.
While Roshan delivers a performance that's grounded and real, and shines particularly brightly in scenes he shares with little Ruhi (you can tell he's a dad, honestly), Shroff leaves a lot to be desired on the cutting room floor. Like I mentioned earlier, he somehow manages only one expression throughout the movie, and you can instantly tell he's a dancer first before anything else, because his fighting moves lack the necessary weight behind them to look real.
I mean, heck, there's a shot in his introduction sequence where one of the goons karate-kicks into the pool, misses by a MILE, and they left that in.
Also, I really have zero clue what the director was going for, because it legit looks like Shroff's instructions were to look like he's a lovesick puppy whenever the character of Kabir is around. Seriously, he looks like he's in love half the time, and the funniest thing here is that just from observing trailers and music videos of the sequel, WAR 2, NTR SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN GIVEN THE SAME EXACT DIRECTION!
This is gonna be a hoot next week when we delve into the other movie.
But for tonight, this is enough. WAR is an entertaining entry in this spyverse, and certainly one of Roshan's better roles in the last few years, because he really does best as an action hero.
Come back next week to see what the hell kind of crisis he has to handle in WAR 2!
xx
*images and video not mine
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