Bhuj : The Pride Of India – Movie Review

 

Bhuj : The Pride Of India – Movie Review

YZen Rating : A very poor 1 star.

The movie is set in the backdrop of a very famous story of courage & valour of 300 Bhuj (essentially from village of Madhapur) women who risked their lives to restore the IAF airstrip. This had to be done so as to get the landing strip ready, almost overnight, for Indian troops to land and counter Pakistan’s air & land attack on Vighakot. This act of courage assumes greater significance as the regular contractors had fled due to the war situation & these brave women actually tore down their own homes for the materials to be used for the reconstruction of the airstrip. In middle of all this is Squadron Leader Vijay Karnik (Ajay Devgn) who is marshalling his wounded troops as well as motivating these women.

However, the movie miserably fails to bring any of this real story to life. At the very beginning, we have a battle in the skies with war planes bombing the Bhuj airbase. Now when the sirens are sounding, the soldiers are just watching the sky, almost as if checking for rain. Without any dialogues or commentary, the aerial combat looks like some game in a video parlor. It could be an air show on Republic Day as the fighter planes are doing cartwheels and zipping back & forth without any purpose. At one point, the 2 enemy pilots even have an eye ball to eye ball confrontation!! VFX effects are next to zero. Background score is absolutely lame. You have to see some real good action flicks, where even if the action looks unrealistic & the music sets your pulse racing.

In the same breath, the war shifts to land, where a certain Col.R.K.Nair (Sharad Kelkar), (introduced as a Malayali who broke the jaw of Pakistani boxer in a boxing match, but married a “muslim viklang” – what a deplorable statement), is encouraging his army of 120 troops to battle some 1000+ incoming Pak battalion with tanks. The constant moving back & forth between Vijay Karnik & Nair and the flashbacks in between leads to nausea in trying to keep up with the topsy turvy story-telling.

In an effort to make it a masala movie, the writer/director, uses the ‘cinematic liberties’ and in the process dilutes the main sheros of the story and also take away their courage, bravado & sacrifice. The entire flavor of a good patriotic movie is undone by some ghastly over the top script, poor acting, lousy audio & visual effects, not required & forgettable songs, over dramatization and much more.

There is whole wasted song in which Ajay Devgn sings for his wife at their anniversary celebrations at the Bhuj airbase. Later, Ajay Devgn tries to give a rousing speech where his prose could have been an exact copy of ‘Sandesh Aate Hai’ song (Border). A Muslim girl, Heena (Nora Fatehi) is shown as an Indian spy but falls before she can deliver. Sanjay Dutt comes in as Pagi, (from the sets of PK, with the same attire), and his fight using an axe with 100 over Pak army soldiers is too difficult to digest. In one scene, Ammy Virk’s (Baljeet – fighter pilot), plane is shot down & in a later scene, he not only survives the crash in the sea but also swims back to the shore & then goes home to check on his lil’ daughter, without reporting to base. His senior officer who assumes that Baljeet is dead in the crash, "happens" to drive-by sees him & waves back with a hi ! Duh ??? 

I can go on & on with what's wrong with the film but that would take reams of pages to even attempt to analyze the nonsense in the name of cliched patriotism ! 

While the airstrip is being repaired, the sheros of Bhuj are showing as breaking into loud bhajans with huge dhols, which in reality was a very covert operation, where the ladies wore dark green clothes as camouflage & the airstrip was covered with cow dung ! All this just take sheen off the real story and the brave women are just left with bhajans & some panic running. 

I could not find one good thing to say about this movie. Not even the slo-mo Ajay Devgn scenes of walking away while defusing bombs or when the enemy fighter planes are bombing his base.

All in all – completely avoidable

 

 Sunderben Jetha - played by Sonakshi Sinha

Village women repairing the airstrip

 Vijay Karnik - played by Ajay Devgn

 The actual airstrip - check the depth of that crater !!! 

 

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