2 Stars (out of 4)
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As with any movie inspired by true events, it’s hard to know how faithfully Ground Zero depicts Officer Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey’s pursuit of the terrorist known as Ghazi Baba. But if you handed the premise to anyone who’s skimmed a screenwriting book or two and considers themselves sufficiently ready for the big time, this is the movie they’d write. Ground Zero is as standard a terrorism thriller as it gets.
The story opens in Srinagar in Indian-administered Jammu & Kashmir. In August 2001, a Muslim terrorist persuades three teenage boys to take guns and kill one of the many heavily armed Indian soldiers stationed around town. A poster of Osama Bin Laden hangs on the wall, though the 9/11 attacks won’t happen for another month.
Two Indian soldiers — one Hindu, one Sikh — stand in the market talking about how excited they are for Eid. The movie wants you to know they are DEFINITELY NOT Islamophobic. A kindly Muslim vendor gives the automatic-weapon-toting Hindu soldier a chocolate in thanks for his hard work. The soldier donates to the local Eid fund in return. Moments later, one of the young men from the opening scene shoots and kills the soldier, disappearing into the crowded streets.
The murder is the work of the “Pistol Gang,” who’ve killed 70 soldiers in the span of a year. The head of the local Border Security Force (BSF) office says: “I want my best man here.” Cut to Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey (Emraan Hashmi) rescuing a shepherd boy while in the middle of a shootout with suspected terrorists.
Dubey returns to Srinagar and cracks part of the code that the terrorists use to coordinate their activities. But he mistakes the instructions for an attack on the government office in Srinagar, when the terrorists’ real target was the Indian Parliament in Delhi.
Federal agents arrive in Srinagar on the trail of one of the perpetrators of the Parliament attack, spouting cliched lines like, “We tracked him. We have to go now!” Dubey suggests not arresting, but following the suspect, in case there’s a link between the Delhi attack and the Pistol Gang. But the feds want to get their guy and beat a confession out of him. When Dubey protests, his commanding officer admonishes him with, “It’s an order.” This is first-draft dialogue, at best.
Hashmi is a charming actor and makes Dubey interesting. He’s especially good when Dubey is with his feisty wife Jaya (Sai Tamhankar) and their three kids. The family sequences are so enjoyable that it’s weird when Dubey acts recklessly enough to prompt his subordinates to exclaim, “It’s suicide!”
Dubey’s rashness dovetails with another Bollywood screenplay formula Ground Zero borrows heavily from: the rogue cop. Government bureaucracy and chains of command keep this one gifted officer from following his instincts and solving the case, as in so many Ajay Devgn and Salman Khan cop dramas before.
The difference with Dubey is that his superpower isn’t superhuman strength or indestructibility. It’s empathy. He wants to find Ghazi Baba with a minimum of bloodshed and intimidation because he knows that life in Srinagar isn’t easy for its residents. He tells a subordinate: “When a belly is empty, the brain can’t tell the difference between right and wrong.”
Dubey’s disciplined strategies and acknowledgement of local poverty give Ground Zero cover for evading the question of what role the soldiers’ presence plays in exacerbating tensions. There’s a scene where Dubey’s young daughter confesses to being afraid of the gun-toting soldier that accompanies her and the other BSF offspring to school, almost as if to suggest that only children fail to appreciate that the heavily armed soldiers are there for their benefit.
This is very much a film of its time for as broad an audience as possible, where good and bad are clearly delineated. There’s even a shot when the terrorists driving to Parliament hear a song with the lyrics “Vande Mataram” on the radio and immediately turn it off, just in case you doubted their badness.
To be clear, this movie is based on real events that resulted in many deaths, and the perpetrators were caught thanks to skill and heroism of the Border Security Force (Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey in particular). But Ground Zero tells the story in the most boilerplate, predictable manner. At the midpoint of the film, I made a list of six things I thought would happen in the second half (not knowing anything about the true story). I was right about five of them. Ground Zero feels like studio Excel Entertainment’s attempt to cash in on a trend. That doesn’t diminish the efforts of the real people involved in the story or tarnish anyone’s memory. I’d argue that they deserve a better movie.
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