Shershaah (2021)

(Amazon Streaming, February 2022) For those used to the war movies of the Anglosphere, taking a look at other conflicts can be interesting in its own right. So it is that Shershaah drops us on the Indian side of the 1999 Kargil war, and uses that as the flashpoint to tell us about the story of real-life hero Vikram Batra. This is, to be clear, a propaganda film. It’s utterly uninterested in being even-handed in its depiction of the conflict, and equally uninterested in anything but a hagiography of its lead characters. You can get swept up in it, though: despite the lengths (135 minutes!) and tangents typical of big-budget Indian productions, Shershaah tells a familiar tale of a man becoming a hero, and illustrates it spectacularly with action sequences that aspire to the Hollywood standard. (They don’t quite get there due to substandard CGI, but they clearly get the point across even when they grossly overdo the explosions.)  Sidharth Malhotra is credible when it counts as the heroic lead, and few expenses have been spared to deliver a credible war movie from the Indian perspective. It’s hardly perfect with a largely useless framing device, a slow first hour and other assorted quirks—I suspect that its appeal falls sharply the moment you go beyond the Indian diaspora. Still, I had a better time with Shershaah than many other recent Indian films, so its popularity is not a mystery.