'Ground Zero' Movie Review: Emraan Hashmi Leads an Agile Kashmir Thriller

Director: Tejas Prabha Vijay Deoskar
Writers: Sanchit Gupta, Priyadarshee Srivastava
Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Zoya Hussain, Sai Tamhankar, Mukesh Tiwari, Lalit Prabhakar, Deepak Parmesh, Abhay Dheeraj Singh
Language: Hindi

A soldier is posted in a communally sensitive region. It’s a thankless and dangerous job. Colleagues die every week. Insurgents and religious fundamentalists lure youngsters into a life of arms and suicide vests. Market places and tourist spots remain unsafe. Gunshots and violent chases are met with a mix of nonchalance and resignation by the locals. This well-respected soldier empathises with the locals because he believes they’re somewhat in the same boat — caught in the crossfire between countries, politicians, perceptions, and narratives. Following a spate of high-profile violence, he becomes an outsider with a conscience. His patriotism is personal: justice for fallen comrades and innocent civilians, a quest for peace, and a distrust for central intelligence agencies and their bureaucratic ways. His mission to nab the mastermind unfolds despite the system, not because of it.

Ground Zero is inspired by the true story of a BSF (Border Security Force) operation that led to the killing of Ghazi Baba, the deadly Jaish-e-Mohammed commander who played a key role in the 2001 Indian parliament attack. It stars Emraan Hashmi as senior BSF officer Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey, the man leading this tireless mission. A Kashmir movie can be complicated on the best of days. But the recent Pahalgam terror attack marks the worst of days. The rage is fresh, the grief is raw. The timing of Ground Zero is, of course, entirely coincidental. The renewed focus on the fragility of the land lends this film the sort of urgency it didn’t ask for — the pressure to mean more, imply more, be more.

Yet, it’s this very pressure that defines its identity. No Valley-set story exists in isolation. The tensions in it are timeless, relevant in most decades. But the gallantry here is lonely and defiant, in service of a broader humanity. Read the first paragraph with geopolitical context, and it emerges that the catharsis Ground Zero offers is a more rooted and realistic one. It’s a catharsis so transient that the film, unlike many of its ilk, plays out like a long-term tragedy. A father’s dream of seeing his kids go to school in a bus manned by Santa Claus rather than gun-toting jawans can only be realised so far — the bus is soon manned by a gun-toting Santa Claus. A Muslim shopkeeper refuses to take money from a Bengali BSF officer on Eid, but the officer is shot dead by Kashmiri students who are paid per kill.

As an action thriller, Ground Zero is mostly engaging. The final raid is intense, if a little too Zero Dark Thirty-coded. The film goes out of its way to establish Dubey as a large-hearted maverick. His superiors don’t believe in him a lot. The IB boss from Delhi is especially snarky; he derisively refers to Dubey as “James Bond”. Dubey’s BSF boss (Mukesh Tiwari) is especially grumpy. His colleagues respect the heck out of him; when Dubey returns from a long mission, they’re so pleased to see him that they almost hug him, only to settle for a more professional greeting (“Jai Hind, sir!”) instead. He never goes by the playbook. When he nabs a young handler who’s about to shoot him, he doesn’t detain or kill him; Dubey has the patience to scold, unradicalise, reform and recruit him as a police mole. Their bond is so seamless that doom is imminent — it earns the famously stoic man the license to break down at the right moment.

What this does is stage Dubey as an army man with civilian emotions. When his fellow officers are killed, he sees himself as a Kashmiri losing fragments of his extended family. Even for an Excel Entertainment protagonist, he’s a bit too sorted (or woke). All along, Dubey is chastised more than he is celebrated: his fight is with the infrastructure of the conflict just as much as the militants who pull the trigger. Most of his setbacks revolve around a growing disillusionment with the system; the only difference is that his rebellion wears a uniform. His tropey pursuit of the terrorist hits harder because the BSF team has to overcome internal handicaps — red tape, rules, hierarchy, arrogance — to do their job. Hashmi’s performance works because the character’s smugness, too, feels like a coping mechanism. He injects Dubey’s vulnerability with a Bollywood spirit that makes him prone to mistakes and misjudgments.

A still from the film.

At one point, a reporter questions his ability to protect the country when he can’t even save his own jawans. His wife’s pained response (“blame those who pick up the guns”) humanises the concept of security lapses in a region where most soldiers are often reduced to foot-soldiers. At another point, Dubey is so fed up with the optics and machinations of command that he decides to leave. When an IB officer tries to guilt him for quitting Kashmir without restoring it to the “jannat (heaven)” it used to be, he yells “bhaad mein gayi jannat! (heaven can go to hell)”. But when a BSF colleague appeals to his ego — admitting that they only felt secure when he was around — his transformation is instant. It’s convenient, but Dubey’s allegiance has no time for labels.

In some ways, Ground Zero evokes the untethered courage of the doctors in Mumbai Diaries 26/11 (2021) and the revolutionary in Sardar Udham (2021). The journey doesn’t pretend to be a lofty statement. The heroism is almost incidental. It doesn’t follow a trajectory or type — it’s often a consequence of primal impulses, trauma and survival instincts. There is no winning or losing, just the stalemate of avenging loved ones in the line of duty. Ultimately, it’s the story of a hard cog in the wheel that never stops. Context or no context, the first four lines stay stuck in an endless loop: a (ground) zero sum game of sorts. A soldier is posted in a communally sensitive region. It’s a thankless and dangerous job. Colleagues die every week. Religious fundamentalists lure youngsters into a life of arms and suicide vests. Market places and tourist spots remain unsafe.