1.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Fighter on Netflix

Fighter is just what you’d imagine when you think of a Bollywood version of Top Gun. The predictable action flick about a reckless jet pilot is mostly fine until an aggressively patriotic climax that veers into jingoism.

Hrithik Roshan stars as Shamsher “Patty” Pathania, ace pilot among the Indian Air Force’s “Air Dragons” squadron. Fighter director Siddharth Anand also directed Roshan in the action flick War, the highlight of which was Roshan’s character’s epic entry scene. Anand tries to give Roshan a similar introduction in Fighter, but it feels derivative.

The Air Dragons team includes fellow jet pilots Taj (Karan Singh Grover) and Bash (Akshay Oberoi), and also helicopter pilots like Minal “Minni” Rathore (Deepika Padukone). All of the other male pilots are married or have facial hair, so obviously Minni and Patty will fall in love.

Commanding Officer Rakesh “Rocky” Jaisingh (Anil Kapoor) thinks Patty takes dangerous risks, but the force needs all the help they can get to combat a rising wave of terrorism in Kashmir (the film is set in 2018, before Article 370 was revoked). The squad’s training is interrupted when a terror blast takes out several buses full of Indian soldiers on their way to the region.

If you’ve seen either of the Top Gun movies, you can more or less guess where Fighter is going. The Air Dragons retaliate for the explosion, and Taj and Bash are shot down by Pakistan’s ace pilot: “Red Nose.” (They just had to give him a stupid call sign.) Rocky blames Patty, demoting him and shipping him off to be a flight instructor. But when a recovery mission goes sideways, Patty returns to (hopefully) save the day.

The story is serviceable enough. The actors generally give decent performances, despite Anand’s preference for heavy-handed sentimentality. Padukone and Roshan are at their best in a scene where Patty packs following his demotion, leaving not just the Air Dragons behind but Minni as well.

But Fighter is a movie that says one thing and does another. Characters speak broadly about the Indian public and the military fraternity at large, but every plot point is directly connected to Patty or Minni by either romantic or familial connections. Note that Patty only plots revenge against Pakistan for his dead fiancée — another helicopter pilot (he has a type) — not for any of the other Indian soldiers killed in action that he doesn’t know personally.

Patty states repeatedly that the Indian military has nothing against Pakistan as a country, only against terrorists working within its borders. But the movie immediately follows Patty’s speech with a scene of terrorist mastermind Azhar (Rishabh Sawhney) marching into the offices of the Pakistani military and giving orders. Multiple times, the Pakistani government is depicted to be collaborating with, or controlled by, terrorists.

Fighter‘s militant brand of patriotism takes an extreme turn in the climax (which is full of ambitious but silly stunts and corny closeups). Patty claims that India is the rightful owner of all of Kashmir, and he promises that soon Pakistan will be known as “India-Occupied Pakistan.” Ending what should have been a feel-good movie with what amounts to a declaration of war needlessly pushes this triumphant moment into a dark place.

Links

• Fighter at Wikipedia
• Fighter at IMDb
• Top Gun: Maverick at Wikipedia
• Revocation of Article 370 at Wikipedia
• My review of War