Tag Archives: Karan Singh Grover

Movie Review: Fighter (2024)

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1.5 Stars (out of 4)

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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all the help they can get to combat a rising wave of terrorism in Kashmir (the film is set in 2018, before Article 370 was revoked).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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Movie Review: Alone (2015)

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Alone3 Stars (out of 4)

Buy or rent the movie at iTunes

A horror movie starring Bipasha Basu (or anyone, for that matter) as a pair of conjoined twins sounds like a recipe for disaster. But Alone is creepy, well-paced, and far better than one would expect it to be.

Basu plays Sanjana, the surviving member of a pair of identical twins once joined at the waist. Her deceased sister, Anjana (also Basu, in flashbacks), wore glasses, making it possible to tell the two apart.

Sanjana’s marriage to Kabir (Karan Singh Grover) is suffering due to her co-dependence. Her survivor’s guilt led them to flee her family home in Kerala. When her mother is seriously injured in a suspicious accident, Sanjana and Kabir return to the home haunted by memories of Anjana. But is it just Anjana’s memory haunting the place, or Anjana herself?

The married couple shares a complicated dynamic. Who can blame Sanjana for having emotional issues, considering her mother’s present ill health and her unresolved guilt about her sister’s death? Apparently Kabir can. He’s unsympathetic toward his wife, which is shocking given that he’s known the twins since childhood and should be able to understand their unique bond.

It’s only after a psychologist, Dr. Namit (Zakir Hussain), tells him to stop being such a jerk that Kabir starts treating his wife with the understanding she deserves. Kabir’s early bad behavior only looks worse when he and the doctor finally see proof that Sanjana’s troubles aren’t all in her mind; her sister’s spirit really is out to kill her.

Alone‘s plot has a lot of twists and turns, appropriately mirroring Sanjana’s disturbed mental state. Any confusion as to why events proceed the way they do is resolved in satisfying fashion by the story’s end. The clever way the tale is told looks even better upon further reflection.

The acting is uneven, partly due to the way the characters are written. There’s only so much Grover can do to make a jerk like Kabir appealing. Basu struggles initially to make scared, fragile Sanjana relatable, but her character evolves as the movie proceeds, culminating in a fun, crazy climax. The two attractive leads share a steamy chemistry during the film’s love scenes.

For a Hindi movie, Alone is fairly scary, without resorting to gross visuals or gore. The large, dark house sets a spooky mood where one can easily imagine seeing things moving about in the night. The movie doesn’t shy away from jump scares, and it features some nice misdirection.

I admit, I expected Alone to be more unintentionally funny than anything else. It only is on a couple of occasions, as when Basu has to simulate a poltergeist attack by flinging herself onto the ground and into walls. There is also some not-so-subtle innuendo in the lyrics of a love song sung by a male vocalist: “I’ll trickle drop by drop and stay on your body.”

But Alone dashed my low expectations and delivered a solid horror film. Except for an overly long scene involving a religious ritual, the momentum never flags. The story gets progressively more interesting and complicated, and the payoff is satisfying. It’s an entertaining flick.

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