Sky Force review – Akshay Kumar stands tall in threadbare air-war flagwaver
Kumar does his best to inject some humanist gravitas into a film set during the 1965 India-Pakistan war, that is otherwise obsessed with duty and sacrifice
The hope is that the Hindi mainstream is learning from its current spell of commercial turbulence. The evidence, alas, suggests otherwise. For Republic day in 2024, we got Fighter, a glossy all-star flypast that aped Top Gun: Maverick with added flagwaving; despite a considerable promotional push, it divebombed at the box office. This year, we get Sky Force, a period variation on much the same theme, unpicking the fallout from an Indian strike on a Pakistani airbase during the conflict of 1965. While avoiding complete crash-and-burn, directors Abhishek Anil Kapur and Sandeep Kewlani are but tinkering within an increasingly resistible framework.
For starters, this sortie is sober rather than flashy. Scenes are timestamped to underline the factual basis; the xenophobia gets dialled down as far as the genre allows. Yet the arms budget has also been slashed in Fighter’s wake. It’s not so noticeable on the ground, where Akshay Kumar’s upright Group Captain Ahuja briefs his squadron of young Tigers: flyboys with try-hard call names like Cockroach, Panther and Bull. (Imperfectly-chiselled, almost-hunky newcomer Veer Pahariya draws the short straw as Tabby, Sky Force’s own Private Ryan.) You can’t, however, miss the cheapness up in the air, where every dogfight has the look of cutscenes from a mid-90s PlayStation game.
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