LATEST NEWS

After the moderate success of Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Café and Akshay Kumar’s Baby, Heart-stopping No-nonsense Indian-military-covert-mission Action Thriller’ is now a legitimate genre. Directed by Kabir Khan, fresh from the roaring success of Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Phantom plays out like a post-26/11, wish fulfillment sequel to Baby.

Phantom was co-written by Parvez Shaikh (Queen) in collaboration with Hussain Zaidi (Black Friday, Dongri to Dubai) – and the premise is quite interesting. India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) captures a terrorist crossing over into Indian territory and learns that the LET is planning yet another major terror attack. This time, RAW decides it is not going to sit around waiting for the bad guys to cause damage in India. So they concoct a plan to send a message to Pakistan. They recruit an unlikely but lethal hero and send him on a covert mission to infiltrate and kill everyone responsible for 26/11. The expert, codenamed Phantom, is of course Saif Ali Khan, who is flown to various parts of the world to carry out the assassinations.

This is an exciting plot and Khan does a fairly good job of maintaining the tension throughout the film. Little time is wasted in frivolous things. Even the romantic angle between Phantom and a Darkwater operative named Nawaz (Katrina Kaif) is kept to a minimum, and the ticket-selling commercial value songs are used to actually drive the story forward.

Technically Phantom is one of the most accomplished films to have come from Bollywood – all the military stuff is legit, the shootouts carry weight instead of sounding like Diwali crackers and there’s even a U-boat which looks fairly real. It’s also hard not to be entertained by Phantom zooming across London, the US, Syria and Pakistan to exterminate very obvious scumbags like Hafiz Saeed and David Coleman Headley.There are a couple of applause-worthy lines thrown in for a good jingoistic measure, but it’s nice to see the film being less in your face than, say, Gadar and even Bajrangi.

While technically good, the film, along with Saeed and Headley, also terminates one other thing – logic. There are so many plot holes in the Phantom plan you’ll begin to wonder if RAW is full of eighth graders plotting revenge against girls in school who dumped them. The film opens with Khan getting involved in a hit and run in Chicago, then chasing the perpetrator in a long-drawn action sequence, almost turning towards the camera and asking why the guy hit his car, after which the guy falls off a bridge, disappears. Next thing we know, Khan is sent to the exact same prison as Headley.

This kind of convenience and contrivance peppers the movie as Phantom prances around from one country to another, relying on feeble and laughably improbable mission guidelines. It’s actually more teenage fan fiction than a probable military mission.

The film is also gratingly miscast. Khan has very little screen presence and looks exactly the way he did in Bullet Raja. Whether there’s shock, or relief or fright, there’s little shift in Khan’s bearded countenance or body language. The less said about Kaif the better. The makers of Baby took a chance and cast a lesser known face (Taapasee) for the role of a female operative aiding the hero, and it worked powerfully – Kaif on the other hand is once again relegated to looking photogenic in various exotic locations.

Taking the cake and the whole bakery along with it is Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, the gifted actor from Shahid and Raanjhanaa who is seen hamming away to glory as an overenthusiastic RAW newbie. He’s given some of the worst lines of the movie and does his utmost to deliver them with the least possible control. Just when you think he’s done delivering lines that clunk, he pops up alone on top of a submarine in the middle of the ocean, hilariously searching for our marooned hero.

If you’re willing to ignore the plot holes and are a fan of Khan and Kaif, Phantom will please you. But it’s just entertainment, and never really makes you wonder about the ethical boundaries or the global consequences of the Indian military carrying out a mission like this. It’s quite silly from start to end, but it’s never boring.