Movie Review: Fighter (2024)

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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all the help they can get to combat a rising wave of terrorism in Kashmir (the film is set in 2018, before Article 370 was revoked).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.

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Streaming Video News: January 7, 2025

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Happy New Year! I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix with a ton of surprise additions to the catalog from late last month — most of them older Hindi theatrical releases from Alt Balaji and Salman Khan Films. I wrote about them in detail for my December Indian roundup for What’s on Netflix. Here’s what was added:

The new series Black Warrant debuts on Netflix on Friday, January 10. I wrote about it in detail for What’s on Netflix as well.

We’re in a quiet period for streaming right now, with few theatrical releases waiting to debut online and only a handful of Original series set to launch on Netflix and Hulu in the coming weeks. In the meantime, check out director Dibakar Banerjee’s new short film Badminton — starring Jim Sarbh and Sayani Gupta — which you can stream on YouTube or watch below:

Streaming Video News: December 20, 2024

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I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix with today’s debut of the Original music documentary Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous. Netflix also announced the first two Original premiere dates for 2025. Vikramaditya Motwane’s drama series Black Warrant comes out on January 10, and the celebrity docu-series The Roshans releases on January 17. I wrote a preview of Black Warrant for What’s on Netflix.

In other Netflix news, I was recently a guest on an episode of the Bollywood Drafts podcast where we ranked the Top 10 Netflix Original Hindi Films. I had so much fun talking with Suchin and Cris about their favorites — including some intriguing movies that I Whathaven’t seen — and I appreciate host Manish for having my back on a controversial pick. 🙂 Without spoiling the final rankings, here was the Top 10 list I assembled before the recording (title links go to the Netflix entry, star links go to my review):

  1. Bulbbul (2020) — ★★★★
  2. Amar Singh Chamkila (2024) — ★★★★
  3. Jaane Jaan (2023) — ★★★★
  4. AK vs AK (2020) — ★★★½
  5. CTRL (2024) — ★★★½
  6. Brahman Naman (2016) — ★★★½
  7. Ludo (2020) — ★★★½
  8. Kho Gaye Hum Kahan (2023) — ★★★½
  9. Sector 36 (2024) — ★★★½
  10. Monica, O My Darling (2022) — ★★★½

I also updated my list of Bollywood movies on Hulu with the addition of the Marathi series Lagnanantar Hoilach Prem.

I’m going to take most of the rest of 2024 off for the holidays. It’s a good time, too, since things look very quiet on the streamers for the next two weeks. I expect to see Singham Again debut on Amazon Prime on the afternoon of Thursday, December 26. Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 should come out on Netflix on the same day, which is also when the Tamil film Sorgavaasal is scheduled to debut.

After the new year starts, it’s time to review some final movies before making my Best and Worst of 2024 lists. I’m considering box office blockbusters like Singham Again and Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3, plus Fighter, Bad Newz, and Baby John (though that likely won’t stream until late February). I’m also interested in theatrical releases Jigra and Madgaon Express and OTT exclusives Sikander Ka Muqaddar and Despatch. Which titles should I prioritize? Anything I’ve left off of your must-watch list?

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Thanks for another great year at Access Bollywood! — Kathy

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Most Watched Netflix Original Indian Movies of 2024

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What’s on Netflix — the great site that just published my huge Netflix Indian Originals 2025 preview — posted their guide to the most watched Netflix Original movies of 2024. Two charts separate English Original movies from non-English Original movies. Tabs allow you so see how films performed in their first, second, third, and fourth week of release.

The data is derived from Netflix’s weekly Top 10 lists, posted every Tuesday. This is a smaller subset of the data Netflix publishes every six months in its Engagement Reports, but that information obviously isn’t out for the second half of 2024. Though less comprehensive, data from the weekly Top 10 lists still gives us a good idea of which Netflix Originals were most popular — or at least most in-demand right after they released.

I’m going to look at just the results for the First Four Weeks as compiled by What’s on Netflix to see what Indian Original movies released in 2024 were the most popular. I’ve noted below which movies did not rank in the Top 10 for four full weeks after their release (or failed to chart at all). The links below go to my review of each film. Here are the Most Watched Netflix Original Indian movies of 2024:

  1. Do Patti — 17,000,000 cumulative views
  2. Sector 36 — 12,100,000 cumulative views (dropped out after 3 weeks)
  3. Maharaj — 11,600,000 cumulative views
  4. Bhakshak — 10,400,000 cumulative views (dropped out after 3 weeks)
  5. Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba — 10,100,000 cumulative views
  6. Sikandar Ka Muqaddar — 9,500,000 cumulative views (in first 3 weeks)
  7. Murder Mubarak — 6,300,000 cumulative views (dropped out after 2 weeks)
  8. Amar Singh Chamkila — 5,300,000 cumulative views (dropped out after 2 weeks)
  9. Wild Wild Punjab — 4,500,000 cumulative views (dropped out after 2 weeks)
  10. CTRL — 2,100,000 cumulative views (dropped out after 1 week)
  11. Vijay 69 — Failed to feature in the weekly Top 10

It’s no shock to find Do Patti atop the list with stars as big as Kriti Sanon and Kajol in the leading roles. Given the dark subject matter of Sector 36, I’m a little surprised to see it in second place (not that I’m complaining; it’s a great movie). Undoubtedly, news about the court case that delayed Maharaj‘s release raised awareness of the film.

Sikandar Ka Muqaddar hasn’t even been out for four weeks yet, so it’ll be fun to see if it can climb past Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba into fifth place when it completes its first month of release.

The two major disappointments on the list are Amar Singh Chamkila and CTRL, two of my favorites of the year. When the next Engagement Report comes out, I hope the data will report that they were just slow burns that got more views over time. They really are worth watching.

How did your favorite Netflix Original rank?

Streaming Video News: December 13, 2024

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Quick update to say that my very, very big preview of New Indian Netflix Original Movies and Series Coming to Netflix is up at What’s on Netflix. I’ve got detailed write-ups of 11 new series, 12 new movies, and 11 returning series, with details on cast, plot, and production status. There are also some small bits of news about projects with indeterminate fates (I’m ready to declare Baahubali: Before the Beginning dead). My favorite tidbit is about the crime series that likely won’t be going forward because its creator was arrested for fraud.

Please give the post a read. It’s a ton of work, but I really have fun putting it together. What Netflix Original shows and movies are you looking forward to next year?

Streaming Video News: December 12, 2024

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I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Amazon Prime with today’s premiere of Season 2 of the musical series Bandish Bandits. The Telugu film Mechanic Rocky was also added for streaming, with a separate entry for a version featuring dubbed dialogue in Kannada, Malayalam, or Tamil (select your preference in the audio menu).

Manoj Bajpayee’s new movie Despatch premiered today on ZEE5.

I also updated my list of Bollywood movies on Hulu with today’s debut of the Telugu series Harikatha: Sambhavami Yuge Yuge (also available in Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, and Tamil).

Finally, I will update my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix on Friday when Season 3 of Mismatched goes live. If you need a recap of Season 2, Netflix summed it up in 3 minutes:

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Movie Review: Agni (2024)

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2.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Agni on Amazon Prime

Agni has novelty on its side, as Hindi films about firefighters are rare. The film’s action scenes are exciting, but the family drama interspersed throughout drags.

Set in 2017, Agni follows the crew of a Mumbai firehouse, led by their chief, Vitthal (Pratik Gandhi). A series of high-rise fires cause massive damage and the death of a firefighter. It’s not long before the station’s investigator Avni (Saiyami Kher) finds a connection between accelerants found at multiple scenes. It looks like the city has an arsonist on the loose, and a skilled one at that.

Meanwhile, the police are looking for the perpetrator of a daring daytime assassination of a politician. The investigation is led by Vitthal’s brother-in-law Samit (Divyenndu), one of Mumbai’s top cops. Samit and his officers beat and threaten to kill suspects until they get a lead connecting them to some of the burned buildings. If the police and firefighters work together, they can solve the case in no time, right?

Not so fast. In the film, the police look down on firefighters, who get a much smaller share of public accolades and government funding compared to the cops. This feeling of disrespect is heightened for Vitthal, whose pre-teen son Amya (Kabir Shah) idolizes his uncle Samit.

As someone who lives outside India, I feel at a disadvantage because I’m not sure if public disrespect for firefighters is real and if there’s a rivalry with the police or they are just conceits of the movie. If they are, then the story may have had an underlying levels of context easily understood by locals. If it’s not, filmmaker Rahul Dholakia’s script — co-written with Vijay Maurya — needed to elaborate on how this disrespect manifests. The film is light on specifics.

Most of the inter-agency disrespect in the story comes from mean-spirited jokes directed at Vitthal at a housewarming party in Sumit’s new luxury apartment. That party scene is awkward, as is a family dinner at a Japanese restaurant. The rivalry between Sumit and Vitthal isn’t interesting, and it takes away from the real source of Vitthal’s hurt: the fact that Amya has grown up and no longer sees his dad as the coolest guy on the planet. The father-son angle has much more emotional appeal but doesn’t get enough screentime.

Even more time is wasted on scenes inside Sumit’s police station, where he and his cronies beat confessions out of people. If the story is about firefighters, focus on the firefighters.

Agni is at its best when Vitthal’s crew is actively battling blazes. The action scenes are well-executed and exciting, with lots of real flames. Any CGI is integrated so well as not to draw attention to itself, and the editing makes it seem as though the characters are in real danger.

Gandhi does a fine job as the character holding all the narrative threads together. He’s at his best in scenes with other firefighters like Avni, his friend Jazz (Udit Arora), and fellow station chief Mahadev (Jitendra Joshi). Sai Tamhankar gives an understated performance as Vitthal’s wife Ruku. I wish she’d played a bigger role.

Despite some slow parts in the first half, Agni‘s story pace picks up as it nears its conclusion. Dholakia’s screenplay sprinkles enough action scenes throughout to reward one’s continued attention.

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Streaming Video News: December 5, 2024

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I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Amazon Prime with today’s world premiere of director Rahul Dholakia’s firefighter drama Agni, starring Pratik Gandhi and Saiyami Kher. Yesterday, the Telugu movie Matka was added to the streaming catalog.

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that the Hindi film Girls Will Be Girls will release on Prime on December 18 following after a successful festival run. It’s unclear if this applies to Prime globally or if it’s only in India, as Girls Will Be Girls is currently available for rent and purchase on Amazon in the United States.

I also updated my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix with today’s streaming debut of Vasan Bala’s jailbreak flick Jigra, starring Alia Bhatt. The Tamil film Amaran was added yesterday, and the Rajkummar Rao-Triptii Dimri comedy Vicky Vidya ka Woh Wala Video comes to Netflix tomorrow afternoon.

ZEE5 debuted the Hindi series Maeri today.

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Movie Review: Devils Stay (2024)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Note: I sometimes branch out from reviewing Hindi films. The Korean horror movie Devils Stay opens in US theaters December 6, 2024.

Had the story of Devils Stay been told chronologically, it could have been a compelling examination of guilt and faith leading up to a climax with terrifying consequences. Instead, the asynchronous timeline hampers character development and fails to build tension.

Devils Stay — directed by Hyun Moon-seop — opens with a typical exorcism movie scene. Teenage girl Cha So-mi (Lee Re) is tied to the bed in a befouled room. Young priest Father Ban (Lee Min-ki) prays over So-mi, who levitates and screams for her dad’s help. Cha Seung-do (Park Shin-yang) breaks down the door to get to his daughter, just in time to watch her die.

A flashback shows So-mi and her father gazing at the stars atop the roof of the hospital where she is a heart patient and he works as a cardiac surgeon. He says that they’ve found a donor heart for her, promising her that everything will be all right after her surgery.

Back in the present, her family gathers at the funeral hall for the start of three days of mourning. A despondent Seung-do thinks he hears So-mi calling to him and sees apparitions of her, convincing him that she’s not really dead. Meanwhile, Father Ban worries that his exorcism was incomplete and that something evil still lurks within So-mi’s body.

One feature of South Korea that makes Devils Stay interesting is that hospitals often have their own funeral homes, usually in the basement near the morgue. That makes it convenient if, say, a heart surgeon who thinks his deceased daughter is secretly alive wants to grab her days-dead body and take it up to a surgical suite to apply the defibrillator pads one last time.

Other than the understandable sentiment of a father who lost his child and a priest who failed his parishioner, there are few emotional hooks in Devils Stay. There’s simply too much missing information to really become invested in the characters. We don’t know how much time elapsed between So-mi’s heart surgery and when she started exhibiting symptoms of possession. We don’t see her interact with her classmates, who appear in just one scene to say she wasn’t behaving like herself in school. We don’t know whose idea it was to summon the exorcist or what other interventions they tried first.

Father Ban has his own thin backstory that is shown in dramatic flashbacks that lack context. The particular dangers to him as an exorcist and the theological consequences of So-mi’s possession could have been more developed, rather than dismissed with an out-of-left-field explanation that’s merely an excuse to put Lee Min-ki into a fight scene.

The choppy timeline also makes it hard for any of the performances to stand out, since we don’t really get a sense of how the characters grow. Other characters like So-mi’s mom and younger brother are afterthoughts from a plot standpoint, and their mere existence doesn’t do enough to give shape to the world the three main characters inhabit.

Reorganizing the timeline and fleshing out some of the characters could have made Devils Stay feel more meaningful than it does in its current form. As it is, the film is more like a random collection of mandatory exorcist-movie scenes without a strong point of view.

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Movie Review: Stree 2 (2024)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Stree 2 on Amazon Prime

Stree 2: Sarkate Ka Aatank (“Woman 2: Terror of the Headless“) works very well as a sequel, but its place in a shared movie universe presents complications.

Stree 2 begins with a well-executed refresher on the events of the original film from 2018. The ghost from Stree arrives at the outskirts of Chanderi, the town she used to terrorize by abducting men who were out after dark. Seeing the statue erected in her honor, she turns away and leaves. Inside Chanderi, she’s further celebrated at a festival where the town’s oddball bookseller Rudra (Pankaj Tripathi) delightfully recounts her story in song form.

Unfortunately, Stree’s absence opens the door for another threat to take her place. The ghost of the conservative village leader who murdered Stree hundreds of years ago visits the town at night, abducting all the “modern” women with aspirations beyond cooking and cleaning for their husbands. Having been beheaded in life, the ghoul rolls his detached dome at his victims, coiling them in his long hair and dragging them away.

The responsibility for dispatching the monster and rescuing the missing women falls to the “Hero of Chanderi,” Vicky the tailor (Rajkummar Rao). However, Vicky is preoccupied, pining for the beautiful unnamed woman (Shraddha Kapoor) who disappeared after helping him drive off Stree years earlier. Even Vicky’s dad (Atul Srivastava) is worried enough about his lovelorn son to give him money to pay for some “friendship.”

Thankfully, the unnamed woman returns to help Vicky, Rudra, and their friends Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) and Jana (Abhishek Banerjee) vanquish the new threat. But will she stick around after this job is done or vanish into thin air again?

Stree 2 comfortably picks up where Stree left off. Amar Kaushik returns as director, and Niren Bhatt does a fine job taking over writing duties. The film’s world-building is terrific, and the actors fall right back into their familiar characters. It’s fun to hear Vicky’s dad speak about sex only in euphemisms again, and Banerjee’s gullible Jana is as charming as ever.

The main issue with Stree 2 comes from it being a part of the Maddock Supernatural Universe of movies, which besides Stree includes 2022’s werewolf flick Bhediya and 2024’s monster movie Munjya. Jana is a major character in Bhediya opposite Varun Dhawan’s lead werewolf Bhaskar, and both cameo in the closing credits of Munjya. What’s important is that Bhaskar plays a major role in the climax of Stree 2.

Nothing about this is inherently problematic. There’s tons of crossover within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the YRF Spy Universe promises more going forward. What those universes have going for them is that all of the properties are available on a single streaming platform (Disney+ for Marvel, Amazon Prime for Yash Raj Films). If you missed a film during its theatrical run on want a refresher before a new release, it’s easy to catch up.

That’s not the case for the Maddock Supernatural Universe movies. Stree and Stree 2 stream on Amazon Prime, Munjya is on Hulu (in the United States, Disney+ Hotstar in India), and Bhediya is on JioCinema — a service that isn’t even available in the US. If Maddock wants to embed such crossover into the narrative these movies, then it needs to make them all easy to access without unnecessary overhead and costs. You can’t weave these movies’ plots together but sell the streaming rights to each title to the highest bidder.

It’s a shame that an operational choice by the studio is the only major knock against Stree 2. It’s otherwise a fun, enjoyable movie.

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