Bhuj: The Pride of India | Bollywood Movie Review by Movie Insert | MOVIE INSERT

 

 Bhuj: The Pride of India is a film so insistent ondesh bhakti, that even the disclaimer is patriotic. After the standard announcement, about the film being a fictional version oftrue events, the disclaimer ends with the line We salute the Indian Armed Forcesand then in even bigger font, Jai Hind! Director Abhishek Dudhaiya maintains thishigh-pitch fervor from the first frame to the last. The film is set during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 andtells the story of how IAF Squadron leader Vijay Karnik, who was in-charge of the Bhuj airport, reconstructed therunaway, which had been destroyed by Pakistani airstrikes, with the help of 300 women from the local village. This act of valor prevented Kutch fromfalling into the hands of the Pakistani army. It’s an incredible story, told here with thenarrative depth of a restaurant menu. The characters are stick figures, who repeatedlyproclaim their love for the motherland. They don’t have conversations.They make declarations. Such as "Pakistan hi Islam ka sabse bada dushman hai orMaratha sirf do baatein jaanta hai - marna ya maarna". These lines of course delivered by the good Indians. The Pakistanis are to the last man, evil buffoons. We know they are Pakistani, becausethey say janaab in every other sentence. And their battle skills are so poor, that in the climacticfight, Sanjay Dutt playing a villager named Pagi, is enough to decimate half the Pakistani army. He is massacring them with an axe, butno one has the good sense to shoot him. Bhuj: The Pride of India has four writers,apart from Abhishek, there is Raman Kumar, Ritesh Shah and Pooja Bhavoria, but it doesn’t have a coherent screenplay. It begins in December 1971 and then flashes back mid-battle to other skirmishes. We get an extended action sequence inwhich Ajay Devgn, playing Vijay Karnik, takes on Pakistani spies in a spice factory. Of course he takes the Sonbai from Mirch Masalaroute, throwing lal mirch at these baddies. Ammy Virk playing fighter pilot Vikram Singh Bajis dodging bombs in the sky one minute. The next, he’s reuniting with his daughter. Nora Fatehi shows up as the spy Heena,we are told that she joined RAW, to avenge her brother, who was stoned todeath after being caught spying for India. So Vijay’s voice over helpfully informs us, that "Pakistan se Heena ki ladaaiNational bhi hai, aur personal bhi". Heena relays critical informationand gets to kick Pakistani butt, but sadly the item song ‘Zaalima Coca Cola’doesn’t make it to the film. I was hoping that it would provide some relief. This film isn’t content to portrayPakistanis as sadistic clowns. It also editorializes on the largerrelationship between the two countries, to establish that Pakistan has no moral fibre. Vijay’s voiceover tells us that in 1947,when India was cleaved into two countries, India gave Pakistan 75 crore rupees as a parting gift. The same money was then used to procurearms that were used against Indian soldiers. No country, Vijay pronounces, would havepaid such a high price for its decency. Vijay is also prone to makingproclamations about women. In one scene, he says: "Kameez se toote huye button se lekar tooti huyi himmat tak, aurat kuchh bhi jod sakti hai". This healing female spirit is representedby Sunderben, played by Sonakshi Sinha. Vijay describes her as Gujarat ki sherni. This is a woman who kills a leopard with asickle, while holding a baby in one hand, setting a new gold standard for multitasking moms. She along with the other village womenrepair the runaway through the night. But their labour and the terror of that momentis utterly lost in this train wreck of a film. Apart from Sunderben, the women who accomplishedthis incredible feat, get zero mileage. Pranitha Subhash, who plays Vijay’s wife,doesn’t have a single dialogue. Bhuj is mostly a series of disjointed vignettesabout men killing or thumping their chests and proudly declaring their love for Bharat ma. Since this becomes excruciating very quickly,I focused on burning questions such as, In Shershaah, Captain Vikram Batra says, "Tirangaa lehra kar aaunga, nahi toh usmeinlipat kar aaunga, par aaunga zaroor". Vijay delivers almost exactly the sameline in this film, so who said it first? Why do Pakistani army officers smokecigars as they plot India’s destruction? Does it help them think better? Why is Ajay Devgn, a National Award-winning actor, content to deliver banal linesand walk heroically in slow motion. Why doesn’t Sharad Kelkar, so goodas Arvind in The Family Man and Shivaji Maharaj in Tanhaji, get better roles? And this really flummoxed me. At one point, Vijay says, "Pagi Hindustan aa gaye, aur RAW join kar liya". Is this really how it works with our premierintelligence agency, you just walk in and join? In his review of The Last Airbender, Roger Ebert wrote, "the film is an agonizingexperience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.” The same is true of Bhuj: The Pride Of India.You can see the film on Disney+ Hotstar.