'War 2': Five Takeaways From Hrithik Roshan-Jr NTR's Clunky Spy Actioner

If you watched Tiger 3 (2023), the last film in the YRF Spy Universe, and were in no hurry to leave the theatre, despite the Shah Rukh Khan cameo having long come and gone, then you may recall catching a post-credits scene. In it, Colonel Luthra (Ashutosh Rana), the grouchy and grizzled spymaster from War (2019) and Pathaan (2023), rings up an old pal, Major Kabir. “You will have to enter the darkness,” Luthra rasps in lieu of a mission brief, "...cross every line between good and evil.” Contrary to what I presumed then, in War 2, Kabir (Hrithik Roshan) isn’t launching a political party or a streaming app. Instead, his objectives remain much the same: look good, move fast, take on a new adversary.

Onscreen, Roshan is clashing with Telugu star Jr NTR. In cinemas, the film is clashing with Rajinikanth's Coolie. As Ayan Mukerji’s glossy actioner hits theatres, here are five takeaways from a morning show…

1) A bit of plot. After the spoils of the first War, Kabir has gone freelance, doing hired hits for the mysterious Contractor (Reshma Bombaywala). He's sought out by an even more mysterious entity, a shadowy transnational syndicate called Kali, which is plotting against India. Kabir is called upon to make a blood vow, a personally devastating one, which puts his old employers, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), on his scent. A special team is assembled, comprising Luthra's daughter, Wing Commander Kavya (Kiara Advani), and Vikram (Jr NTR), a wrecking ball of a soldier who's seen leaping off, in his grand introductory fight, a wrecking ball.

2) War 2 was passed with a U/A certificate, with the censor board reportedly directing the makers to trim nine seconds off a bikini scene (thankfully, it's lime-green in colour, which has prevented additional trouble). The violence, as before, is heavily stylised yet majorly bloodless. In his opening scene, Kabir toys with a dozen Japanese swordsmen, a scene designed to look impossibly cool, yet feels oddly safe and sanitised. Matters barely improve in Spain, where Vikram locks on to Kabir. The expansive visual effects and action choreography have a featherlight quality that's of a piece with past YRF offerings. There are fights on trains, planes, bridges and boats—all looking and landing the same.

3) A puzzler for the ages: why was Ayan Mukerji brought in to captain this ship? I sat through all 170 minutes of War 2, yet noticed not a flicker of the director's presence. The inherent softness and heart of Mukerji's films are replaced here by a repetitive dullness. In Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva (2022), he came up with ideas that, while not spectacularly original, carried a consistency of vision and style. War 2, by comparison, is a jumble of textures and tones, the action sometimes Just Cause, sometimes Tekken, and, in a sequence where Vikram crashes a speedboat onto an active racetrack, straight up GTA Online.

A still from 'War 2'

4) Producer Aditya Chopra is credited with story. His trustiest scribes, Shridhar Raghavan (screenplay) and Abbas Tyrewala (dialogue), cannot recreate the spell they cast in past spyverse films. "India First", Luthra's patriotic motto, is repeated ad nauseam by his underlings. The post-interval flashback is a Salim-Javed-esque origin story that drags on because we already intuit the trajectories the characters are on. The one old-timey touch that actually works comes a little before the final showdown: as Kabir approaches Vikram in his icy lair, 'Yaari Hai' from Zanjeer plays on the radio.

5) War 2, despite its many twists and turns, suffers from a tedium and predictability that's hard to forgive in a flashily modern espionage drama. Roshan and NTR go at each other with gusto, though the latter, scowling frequently and saddled with clunky spytalk like "Chidiya on the move, acting chilled out", is sadly shortchanged in his Hindi debut. This may not all be for the worse, though. Perhaps, in the spyverse, time is up for the Gen Xs and Ys. The franchise could use a shot of Alpha.