★★★

Nationalism has a place in movies.  Indian cinema proves it.

No American movie today would have a scene like the flag wave-off in Fighter.  To understand why it’s there is to appreciate something about borders.  America’s most unfriendly neighbor is a country whose government would never openly declare war, but would happily create a slow-moving fentanyl and population crisis that wears down cities with time.  Over the past decade, only a handful of Hollywood films have shown a keen interest in such a subject – the most notable of which is Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario.  But as good as that movie is, the stars and stripes are hardly ever in your face the way they are in Bollywood.  Why?  Because India has three unfriendly borders, two of which are with nuclear superpowers.  It doesn’t need to imagine a conflict.

If a directive ever came down from on high to a Hollywood studio to put an American flag in every movie, it would either be as a passing checklist item or a satirical gag.  Six years ago, Damien Chazelle’s First Man became briefly embroiled in a controversy over an apparent omission of the American flag on the Moon.  It was made all the more stupid by Ryan Gosling suggesting that Neil Armstrong did not see himself as an American.  Reality was much simpler.  Of course he viewed himself as an American, and the film did have the flag.  You just never saw Armstrong planting it into the Lunar surface.  But such a controversy would be unthinkable in Bollywood.  There is, in essence, your difference.  American studios treat their stars and stripes with indifference at best and contempt at worst.  In Bollywood, the tricolor flag is a grand and essential staple of home and culture, flown and poetically spoken about with the utmost urgency.  Is this coming from Modi?  Maybe a little, but India was like this well before him.  It had to be.  It’s nuclear neighbor China spits out propaganda on repeat like a baby who just learned his first word, whether it’s in the form of a thrilling, yet kind of terrifying Wolf Warrior movies or Zhang Yimou’s colorful and rousing historical epics.

You can’t put nationalist politics aside to understand a film like Fighter.  At least not if you’re like me, and find more to like from cinema in the 1930s than in the 2020s.  But cinema, like any other great medium of art, does not spring from nothing.  It springs from a culture, which is shaped by events that resonate in the minds and imaginations of the people who experience them.  Many of the first Americans ever to fly into combat in war were taught by Howard Hawks – a film industry summer intern who would later bring aviation to the big screen in ways never seen before.  Tom Cruise notwithstanding, Hollywood has long since torn off the muscular wings Hawks fashioned for it back then.  Bollywood, on the other hand, has no shame about displaying them, and like any good blockbuster, Fighter understands, much like a certain Tom Cruise movie after which it models itself did, that suspending disbelief requires less force than the textbook will tell you.  You just need a premise that makes you expect the impossible, and a star that makes you believe it can be done.

Hrithik Roshan is not Tom Cruise.  Mainly because most of the things he’s good at come so naturally to him that you’ve never seen him struggle to work hard at something.  Tom Cruise had to work for his success.  Remember, Tom Cruise – a 5’6 midget came on in the 1980s when the sex symbol of the decade was a man almost a full foot taller than him.  How could he compete with Harrison Ford?  He can’t, except that he can look cool while looking cleaner.  Hrithik Roshan has no rival of such stature.  Next to him, even Deepika looks small and insignificant.

Deepika is given the film’s shortest straw.  She plays an Air Force helicopter pilot who resembles the former lover of Hrithik’s character.  You know she’s insignificant because later in the film, his character meets a female pilot with the call sign of his former lover.  She rattles him as much as Deepika does, which borders on insulting.  At the beginning of the film, my wife asked me: “why did they only make her a helicopter pilot?”  To which, I, in my incredibly sexy mansplaining manner, told her that in some ways, flying a helicopter is more dangerous than flying a fighter jet because you usually can’t eject.  As much as Deepika can do on the screen, she cannot convey that in the way Collette Ferro did in Aliens – a role so iconic that the Terran dropships in Starcraft take after her.

So with limitations upon Deepika being what they are, the question asks itself: can Hrithick carry a film?  Especially with Anil Kapoor, his co-star and rival, looking like he just spent a month in a “cut for every calorie” camp?  Kind of…?  The plot – a group of terrorists from “Pakistan Occupied Kashmir” plan to attack the Indian Air Force.  When they do, India has to retaliate with haste but without waste.  And everything from there within the ranks is just Top Gun minus the egotistical rivalry and gay shirtless volleyball games until it’s time for a daring mission, and then another daring mission.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Bollywood movie if there wasn’t at least one villain who could have radio dialogue with the main character to showcase their dramatic ideological differences.  Not the main villain – mind you; a villain whose face we never see but is far more interesting than the main one featured.  I’d have liked to see more of him, but the moment of his defeat is also the moment the entire movie nearly falls apart.  For a movie advertised and promoted as an epic fighter jet combat thriller, the final act has basically nothing left of it, and our heroes end up on the ground in a firefight and punch-up.  The only reason it’s not one of the worst endings I’ve seen in a Bollywood movie is because the song during the credits saves it.

Still – it’s fun to watch and on the shorter side of Bollywood, which seems like the wrong thing to say about a 2 hr, 45 minute flick.  But it’s much more interesting as a glimpse into India’s sense of nationhood.  Hollywood used to do this too, in a bygone era where many of its actors like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Sterling Hayden, Lee Marvin, Lee Van Cleef, Charles Bronson, and Bob Mitchum, and directors like William Wellman, Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Stevens, and John Huston were war veterans, with perhaps the greatest of them all, John Ford, being a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy during World War II.  Now Hollywood exists to depress, dour, and disappoint people rather than to lift them up to the skies.

For what little else The Fighter may be, it does its national duty with a big tricolor flag.

– Vivek