War

2019
Story by Siddharth Anand and Aditya Chopra
Screenplay by Shridhar Raghavan
Additional Dialogue by Abbas Tyrewala
Directed by Siddharth Anand

Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff team up on the big screen for the first time to both fight alongside and against each other in War! What we get is a Mission: Impossible style masala flick that entertains with plenty of action with a ridiculous story stringing it all together. But the story is secondary, the spectacle and attraction is seeing your heroes Hrithik and Tiger run around together and causing trouble, both against villains and against each other. There is plenty of trouble, plenty of trials, and plenty of heart-pounding fighting as the two leads face off in an action movie storm.

It opens with Kabir (Hrithik Roshan) going rogue and killing his contact, so the hammer of the Indian intelligence services are brought in to smash him down. His former mentee Khalid (Tiger Shroff) is not tasked with bringing him down at first (they feel he’s too close) but at Kabir sets his sights on more high-profile targets, it soon becomes apparent that Khalid is the only hope they got.

Interspersed with this are several flashback stories where we learn that Khalid’s father was a traitor, that his own family turned him in, and that Kabir was the man who put (several!) bullets in his head. That’s why Kabir doesn’t trust Khalid to be part of his super special forces team at first. Khalid has been spending his whole career trying to escape the shadow of his father, and also spends long minutes gazing longingly at Kabir when he’s doing his cool main character struts that are fairly common in high-profile action films. At this point men fighting as brothers and homoeroticism has smeared together to the point where you’re free to pick your own interpretations. Khalid proves his worth by killing a bunch of ISIS goons and soon Khalid and Kabir are dancing it up in celebration. At least we’ve found one thing war is good for, dance parties!

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