‘Alpha’ Movie Review: The YRF Spy Franchise Finds Its Most Hesitant Soldier

“Being careful is the new brave,” says R&AW chief Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor) while driving through Kashmir. He’s reminding his butt-kicking daughter, Durga (Sharvari), to stay alert and expect an attack from rogue forces. We soon hear another of his Kaulisms: “Sometimes you have to go backward to move forward”. He’s dispensing sound military advice, of course. But the film he’s in (Alpha), and the commercial franchise he’s in (YRF Spy Universe), follows this advice to a T. It takes every one of his words to heart, only to damage its own heart in the process.

Alpha is so careful that it’s defensive and underconfident. It’s so afraid of losing that winning is no longer an option. In the spirit of the ongoing FIFA World Cup, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a team that forsakes its own ideology and playing formation on the basis of what’s working for other football teams. It defies all the pre-tournament drills and practice games as well as its own predecessors. As a result, it’s neither here nor there; compromised identities lead to early exits.

Say what you will about the Westernised aesthetic and goofy espionage tales of the franchise over the years, but the one thing they’ve had going for them is their old-school commentary and politics. Their commitment to cross-border humanity as a front for patriotism became a misty-eyed antidote to the more aggressive Bollywood actioners in this genre. Despite the changing surroundings, their simplicity was almost endearing, staying (relatively) true to the Yash Chopra-shaped legacy of the studio. Alpha begins in a similar vein. It opens a few days after the 1999 Kargil War. It employs the tried-and-tested franchise formula, pitting one Indian against another. The good patriot (Kapoor, as Kaul) mourns the cost of war and the price of victory, while the toxic patriot (Bobby Deol, as Colonel Fateh Singh Lakhawat) proposes a nutty supersoldier program.

This involves the injection of a serum called Alpha to make commandos invincible. But the serum isn’t foolproof, despite its name. Kaul’s newborn is pronounced dead at the same time, and the stage is set for a banished Fateh to take his illegal lab-rat program to remote Rajasthan. Who funds him? The question is asked repeatedly, and the answer is an unfortunate twist. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Fateh’s human guinea pig is a cold girl-with-no-childhood trope named Sita. Join the dots. Her pet is a literal guinea pig (a strange exposition device), just like alpha is a literal serum and not a metaphorical one. When Sita makes an entry as an adult (Alia Bhatt), she’s cool, ruthless and, for reasons that will be spoon-fed to us later, determined to destroy her abusive mentor. Her paths will cross with R&AW chief Kaul and his NRI daughter, Durga, who spent her years sporty-spicing up in Spain before returning to her dad’s backyard.

The plot goobledygook and mechanical dialogue aside, at this point you want to believe that Alpha is still a vintage YRF title. Given that Deol’s resurgence was kickstarted by Animal, you see what the film is saying about the intersection between hypermasculinity and modern nationalism. You see how the women’s names, Sita and Durga, try to reclaim mythology from the shackles of male-centric storytelling. You see how the narrative is more concerned with an internal war — an India torn between those who love their country and those who must prove their love — than external enemies. You see a rare effort to platform a female-led spy-action picture on a large scale. You see a disgusted Gen-Z hero who’s lashing out at both liberals and conservatives. You see the neat casting of Alia Bhatt as the bitter outsider and Sharvari as the privileged-but-talented insider. You also see the old-is-gold studio staples in glossy foreign-song sequences, a random buddy arc through Ladakh, and good-looking entry sequences scored to corny Hollywood-coded tracks. You even forgive Bhatt’s anxious performance, and the lifeless chemistry between the two women in a faux-road-trip movie.

But then it happens. The spell is broken in one fell swoop in the second half. You see the precise moment Alpha remembers it’s in a post-Dhurandhar world. It suddenly goes against everything the Tiger movies, Pathaan and War stood for; the very DNA of the franchise is altered in real time. You see the fear of being trolled in its abrupt shift of tone. That sound you hear is of the final frontier being breached. Alpha becomes its own biggest traitor. The weird thing is that there’s no conviction here; it’s pretending to be someone else in a landscape that rewards inflated chests and cross-border bashing.

It’s a far cry from Raazi, which starred Bhatt as an undercover spy who became a cautionary tale of modern warfare. Lines like “Your best boss is India” might have worked in a movie that’s consistent in its stance, but you can tell that Alpha is struck down by imposter syndrome. Even the catchy-Punjabi-music-in-violence gimmick appears retroactively; you can practically touch how Dhurandhar changes it mid-story. The other Hindi female-led assassin movie this week, Baby Do Die Do, has a near-identical premise, but it remains faithful to a protagonist fighting her way through the moral decay of her environment.

Consequently, even the film-making gets exposed. The set-pieces lose context in hindsight. The technicalities look more cosmetic. Everything you want to believe in starts falling apart. Like how the spy actioner needs a mad-science crutch to justify great women in a male-dominated field, as opposed to the natural gifts of Tiger or Pathaan or Kabir. The cameo by Hrithik Roshan’s Kabir further reveals its inherent bias; his action sequence is the one time Alpha comes alive. It’s the one instance where the craft looks both invested and relaxed. These spy-universe cameos are no longer a novelty, but at least they fuel a sense of anticipation in stories that often run out of thrills. Ironically, Roshan’s hair has more fun than Sita (and her performative detachment) and Durga (and her performative pixie energy). Anil Kapoor’s Kaul, who was introduced in the forgettable War 2, possesses more emotional gravity than his two genetically enhanced fighters.

The film reverse-engineers its protagonist, too. It makes little sense for someone like Sita — who has been locked away, trained and brainwashed for years — to promptly go nation-first in the climax. It’s almost as if she has to prove her allegiances a little harder than her male counterparts. Nothing new about that. But Sita’s mission cannot afford to be personal or wounded or defiant; it’s downgraded to something more generic and in vogue. Alpha is stranded somewhere between what it wants to be and what it thinks the country wants to see. It’s a film that hopes to succeed, not one that uses hope as its motif. In doing so, it omits the compassion that seeped through the first few spy outings. After all, being careful is the new brave, but being compliant is the new grave.