First off, I'm neither Indian nor Pakistani, so I didn't come come to this movie with any feelings about the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war one way or the other. In fact, although I'm fairly well acquainted with the war, I had never heard of this movie, or anyone in it, before I saw it listed on Netflix, and based on the description, I thought it might be interesting so I rented it. Bad move on my part.
To begin with, for a film that obviously cost quite a bit of money, it's very sloppily made. It was a bit of a puzzlement when a character starts speaking in English and in the middle of the sentence switches to Hindi, or vice-versa. Don't know why the filmmakers did that, but it's very annoying (as were the completely bizarre musical numbers that were inserted into the middle of the film. Seeing squads of Indian soldiers singing and dancing in the middle of the desert on the eve of war was disconcerting, to say the least. Also, although the film's Hindi dialogue was subtitled in English, the lyrics to the songs weren't. Strange.). The acting for the most part was more reminiscent of an overblown 1909 D.W. Griffith melodrama than a modern (1997) war picture, full of grand theatrical gesturing and overheated, pretentious and ultimately boring stretches of dialogue. The "action" scenes were, to put it mildly, pathetic. I realize this was based on an actual incident, but it must have been VERY "loosely" based because the action consists of wildly improbable and hysterically phony heroics by the Indian soldiers that make the laughable Chuck Norris "Missing in Action" travesties look like documentaries, sneering villainy by the Pakistani side (I almost expected to see the head Pakistani officer twirling his mustache and tying a young girl to the railroad tracks while cackling "Nyah ah ah!") and dialogue that Ed Wood would be too embarrassed to write (one soldier, explaining his mother's blindness, says, "She went blind from the tears she had shed" for her deceased war-hero husband). The special effects are laughable--tanks that get "blown up" are obviously wooden mock-ups, as you can see flaming pieces of wood showering the ground after the explosions and what's left of the tank's "hulk" shattering when it hits the ground, and when some soldiers are "shot" you can see the square outline of the blocks the exploding squibs are attached to beneath their uniforms. One Indian soldier who finds himself in the no-man's-land between the Indian trenches and the attacking Pakistanis suddenly charges the enemy line and is promptly shot about 20 times for his trouble, but amazingly is rescued and brought back to the Indian positions, where he holds on for awhile before finally expiring (after, of course, giving a patriotic speech), while Pakistani soldiers who get shot only once die immediately. However, there's a scene where the Pakistanis overrun the Indian trenches and some very brutal hand-to-hand fighting occurs, and that is reasonably well done--much better than the rest of the "action" was.
All in all, it's a clumsy and badly written (and edited, and acted, and scored) mixture of Hindu nationalism, Indian jingoism, stupidly phony heroics and wildly out-of-place musical numbers. If this is an example of the best that "Bollywood" has to offer, as some reviewers here seem to think, then thanks but no thanks.
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