Tejas Review: An Air Combat Thriller Has Never Been So Frustratingly Airy-Fairy – NDTV

A nonetheless from Tejas. (courtesy: YouTube)

When doubtful, take into consideration the nation – that’s the mantra that Tejas, written and directed by Sarvesh Mewara and produced by Ronnie Screwvala’s RSVP Films, harps upon. It is a movie that religiously adheres to that axiom. It’s all the time doubtful and it by no means lets the nation slip out of its ideas.

However strive as exhausting as it might, Tejas comes a whole cropper – it’s a dead-on-arrival cinematic consignment that does no justice in any respect to the nation, the Air Drive or the medium. It’s an insufferably bland thriller that believes that peddling patriotism can assist it paper over its pockmarks.

Toplined by a very out of her depth Kangana Ranaut within the position of an Indian Air Drive pilot who thrives on harmful missions and empty platitudes, Tejas is a precariously low-flying car that by no means gathers any velocity. It lurches from one crashlanding to a different.

It will need to have taken some doing for the makers to show an aviation actioner into such a stilted, insipid affair. The excruciatingly vacuous writing – the strains that the characters spout are proper out of a how-real-people-should-not-speak handbook, is aggravated manifold by the terribly sloppy appearing throughout.

Ranaut’s eponymous character is a ‘rockstar’ within the guise of a fighter pilot who flies the single-engine mild fight plane that shares her identify. Nicely, nicely, Tejas piloting a Tejas in a mission known as Tejas in a movie titled Tejas – how dramatic!

The movie has a scene during which the attraction of a popstar (Varun Mitra, who exhibits up for a bit, is projected because the heroine’s romantic curiosity after which is seen no extra as a result of the girl he needs to woo has way more necessary issues on her thoughts) is eclipsed by the aura that surrounds Wing Commander Tejas Gill (Ranaut). She is mobbed by autograph-hunting women who look proper by the preening crooner.

That, in a metafictional sense, is the sort of movie Tejas is. No person is allowed to steal the heroine’s thunder right here. It is a Kangana Ranaut present all the best way and that’s the movie’s greatest undoing. There is not a single fleeting second – neglect a whole sequence – in Tejas during which the lead performer is convincing.

Ranaut was infinitely higher as Rani Lakshmibai (in Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi) than she is as an intrepid Air Drive pilot. That, as is clear, is saying loads. The character she performs, all spunk and no substance, has a single dimension. She is aware of no doubts.

From her days within the Air Drive academy to the dangerous mission she undertakes in an effort to save an Indian spy held hostage in Mir Ali city in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Tejas Gill is a fount of unusual intelligence and unshakeable confidence. So, the character has no arc to talk of. She begins the place she ends.

Tejas Gill’s supportive dad and mom pop up in a couple of scenes however the two-hour movie has no area for the story of the protagonist’s rising up years. This ain’t no Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Woman. All that Tejas lets on is that the woman made up her thoughts about turning into a fighter pilot when Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee named India’s fighter plane Tejas.

The feminine-led movie touches upon the gender theme all proper, however solely cursorily. The lads take a backseat as two women lead the cost within the climactic sequences. That’s the level that the movie tries to make with all its would possibly however muffs up its strains.

Tejas plunges straight right into a sortie that Tejas makes within the firm of Afiya (Anshul Chauhan, the one member of the solid who comes anyplace making an impression) to rescue an Air Drive officer whose airplane has crashed within the sea and his physique has washed up on a prohibited island inhabited by the protected Sentinelese tribe.

Tejas refuses to again off regardless of orders from higher-ups and pulls off a daring rescue act, shaking off an assault by the tribals within the course of. She is struck by arrows. However that’s not more than an expert hazard that’s shrugged off with out a lot ado.

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For his or her daring and selfless effort, she and Afiya – the identify would possibly ring a bell however her non secular identification is fiercely guarded – face an inner inquiry. However since it’s Kangana Ranaut who’s within the line of fireplace, you already know that she goes to sail by unscathed.

Sure, that’s the degree at which Tejas flies. Such are the flights of fancy that the exasperatingly listless movie indulges in that hardly half-hour in, it turns right into a little bit of a slog that’s powerful to sit down by. Someone says, Hum uddte uddte jaayenge, desh ke kaam aayenge. The protagonist takes that to coronary heart. There is no such thing as a stopping her from right here on.

As Tejas sits on the controls of her first solo trial sortie, the trainer asks her what she will be able to see. The runway, she replies. Look tougher, the person says. The woman pauses and pipes up: I can see the street that may assist me serve the nation. Spot on! She is prepared for greater issues.

The movie, sadly, by no means is. It crams in all the pieces that you’d anticipate from a drama of this nature. In 2008 Mumbai, terrorists interrupt a comfortable household dinner. A shrieking, smirking mastermind harboured by Pakistan needs to make sure the barbadi of Hindustan.

Additionally look out for a ferocious executioner nicknamed Sar Qalam (which means the act of decapitation) due to his proficiency at slitting the throats of hostages. However to not fear, the enemy troopers that the protagonist has to cope with are a bunch of bumbling, easy-to-hoodwink males.

And for good measure, there’s a spanking new temple that faces the specter of an assault from three jihadists who sneak in to sabotage the inauguration of the grand edifice.

Logic is misplaced within the deafening din of the fight plane. Tejas is a movie that flies into tough climate from the phrase go and by no means manages to discover a approach out of it. An air fight thriller has by no means been so frustratingly airy-fairy.

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