‘Sky Force’ Movie Review: Akshay Kumar Hijacks A One-way Flight To Nowhere

Directors: Sandeep Kewlani, Abhishek Anil Kapur
Writers: Sandeep Kewlani, Aamil Keeyan Khan, Niren Bhatt, Carl Austin 
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Veer Pahariya, Sara Ali Khan, Nimrat Kaur, Manish Chaudhari, Sharad Kelkar
Language: Hindi 

There are two ways to be disappointed with Sky Force. One, through the lens of its creators. Up until now, the production company Maddock Films — on a high following the dizzying success of its horror-comedy multiverse — has managed to innovate and stay interesting without conforming to mass trends and jingoistic patterns. It’s worth noting that Sky Force is its first real foray into this zone. But within the contours of the herd-mentality move, it tries something different. It chooses to dramatise a real-life story that’s equal parts war movie and investigative drama.

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The first half is a chest-beating, Top Gun Maverick-coded, mentor-protege account of India’s retaliatory attack on Pakistan’s Sargodha air base during the 1965 war. It proceeds as expected. You’ve seen one (Fighter, Tejas), you’ve seen them all. The interval point is clever, though: a team of brave Indian Air Force (IAF) pilots stride in slow-mo towards their fighter jets, primed to execute their plan. The most talented and rebellious of them is left behind as a reserve. Given the track record of this genre, you expect the entire second half to be one long counter-strike mission; the reserve is destined to save the day. Especially because a chunk of screen-time is spent on the massacre — the Indian casualties and suffering — that triggers this retaliation. But surprisingly, the actual mission ends within minutes. The rest of the half then revolves around the mentor and group captain’s two-decade-long search for his missing-in-action protege. Nobody helps him because the young man was notorious for breaking rules. His quest for the truth features a bureaucratic struggle, clues in a British author’s book, a Pakistani ex-prisoner with a conscience, and a final flashback of what actually happened. It’s essentially two films for the price of one.

A still from "Sky Force'

Having said that, Sky Force is not different enough. In fact, its tone is too familiar. So the second way to be disappointed is through the lens of an oft-abused genre: the Hindi action historical. The film is written in — and for — the stars. Its wings are visibly clipped by the Akshay Kumar factor. Kumar plays the older Wing commander Om Ahuja, based on Vir Chakra awardee O.P. Taneja. But he’s really just playing an Akshay Kumar hero. The sanctimonious presence of Ahuja browbeats the film into cultural and cinematic submission. He doesn’t speak, he preaches. His voice-over is spread across the film. Even when the squadron team is flying in a formation under the cover of night, his voice from the previous scene helpfully explains every detail (“now we will fly below 300 feet to not be detected by enemy radars”) like the Mr. DNA strand from Jurassic Park.

Ahuja is not a person, he’s a narrative surrogate. He’s so heroic that when the film opens with him interrogating a captured Pakistani soldier, the soldier repeatedly commends him on his past exploits; his sense of honour changes this man’s life. He’s so patriotic that when his boss deters him from planning a counterattack with outdated planes, he has no qualms criticising the ruling government (in 1965) and their obsession with peace and non-violence. His boss parrots Gandhian words, but sounds woefully unconvinced. Ahuja even uses an aggressive new catchphrase like “ghar mein ghus ke maarenge (we will enter their home and kill them) at least twice to reiterate his winning approach. When he introspects and thinks, there’s always a stylish cigarette dangling from his lips. His contempt for Indo-Pakistan peace is so compelling that then-Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri drops the facade in a meeting and starts talking like him (“They want Kashmir? We will give them Kashmir!”) after an attack on home soil.

And of course, there’s the saviour syndrome. Despite the film being about the mysterious disappearance and sacrifice of the young pilot — Veer Pahariya plays T. Vijaya, based on Maha Vir Chakra awardee A.B. Devayya — Ahuja somehow makes it about himself. His perseverance, his magnanimity, his grief and his hope. A montage of his search shows his journey on a map — across three continents — with Ahuja’s pensive face superimposed over it. He delivers a monologue about Vijaya in the climax (“Yes, he was mad… madly in love with his country: a madness called nationalism!”) and instantly changes everyone’s mind in the room. When the flashback reveals Vijaya’s role in changing the aviation industry, it echoes what Ahuja had once taught him during a training sortie — one that ended with Vijaya telling Ahuja that he is a genius. In short, Ahuja gets credit for everything good that happens. If not, he takes credit for everything good that happens. If he were a footballer, he’d be Cristiano Ronaldo.

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This blinding main character energy — of both protagonist and country — infects the film-making. The dry dialogue twists itself into knots to convey that India is handicapped with cheaper planes, low budgets and resources. Basic emotions like pride and joy are exhibited through lines like, “You’ll have a daughter because you’re a good pilot”. When Ahuja speaks to an American engineer, the foreigner spends a minute praising Vijaya before coming to the point. The writing unfolds like lip service. There is no stillness to the storytelling: it’s a hurried loop of song, set piece, exposition, tragedy, speech, repeat. Silence is treated as a crime; reactions are immediate. Scenes and people are converted in a split second. One moment Ahuja is singing on top of a chandelier at a party, and the next, he’s barking orders on base. The problem isn’t that the officers had to stop drinking and urgently report to duty, it’s that they look and behave like they were in a different film altogether.

The entire script seems to be staged and edited like an aerial combat sequence (most of which are passable but scientifically strange). This makes it hard to invest in Ahuja’s 19-year odyssey; he doesn’t look particularly perturbed, while his former students age faster than him. It doesn’t help that the sound mix is all over the place. The intro shots of the heroes on their bikes are scored to a hip-hop anthem that goes: “Bravo he’s a brother from another mother / Riding on the clouds of a mission that is nation”. The film also has this habit of telling and showing in quick succession. For instance, a character recalls a technical glitch, and the shot cuts to the exact moment the character says there’s a technical glitch. Ahuja mentions the IAF pledge to his superior; the very next scene shows him staring at the pledge on a framed photograph on a wall. Not trusting the viewer is one thing, but infantilising them to the point of satire is another. It isn’t enough that we see Vijaya’s wife (Sara Ali Khan) pining for him, a sad song called “Kya meri yaad aati hai? (Do you think of me?)” — more attuned to heartbreak in a Mohit Suri movie than longing in a war drama — keeps surfacing.

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One of the many schoolmaster portions of Sky Force features Ahuja explaining the art of dodging hi-tech missiles in the air. He talks about creating other explosions to trick the heat sensors of the locked-in missiles and distract them towards a false target. Somewhere in there, there’s a political metaphor about the role of this Hindi movie genre today. Films like Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) invent the trick and inspire a generation of imitators. But those like Sky Force struggle to manufacture the heat as well as become the smokescreen. The result is more of an implosion than an explosion — one can’t tell the target from the missile anymore.