In 120 Bahadur, director Razneesh Ghai, after Dhaakad, once again collaborates with cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata to create pretty images. That prettiness is marked by emptiness, as Ghai is more interested in capturing the landscape than his characters and their emotions. 120 Bahadur opens with the shot of a wounded soldier who runs towards the camera and collapses. Instead of wondering what happened to him and how he got here, we look at the scene and think about its beauty, its composition. In another scene, when Major Shaitan Singh Bhati (Farhan Akhtar) talks to his wife, Shagun Kanwar (Raashii Khanna), on the terrace, we pay more attention to the clothes fluttering in the air than to their conversation. Even during a song sequence, we find ourselves admiring the Holi colors and the walls of Udaipur palaces. Akhtar and Khanna don't capture our interest. And when an enemy (he is Chinese) walks towards Shaitan, he saunters in slow motion from the left side of the screen to the right, where Shaitan is on his knees, helpless. Why slow motion? So that we have enough time to absorb the blue sky and sunlight, and to appreciate Nagata's ability to capture clean images. When Shaitan spots 3000 Chinese soldiers marching toward Rezang La, we are not meant to feel intimidated by the sight. Rather, Ghai shoots the scene to highlight his competence with crowd work.
Ghai, in other words, has made 120 Bahadur for his résumé. He has nothing to say about the real incident or about war in general. He merely repeats banal points like a parrot: soldiers miss their families at the border; they are always ready to give their lives for the greater mission. I am not denying the validity of these sentiments, but Ghai and writer Rajiv G. Menon don't go beyond these ultra-basic notions. A few among the 120 soldiers are isolated and given a generic one-line (or one-shot) backstory in which we see them either playing with their kids or receiving blessings from their parents. It's a typical sentimental cliché — a lazy shortcut to establish a "connection" between the characters and the audience. That connection, unsurprisingly, is feeble. When we watch 120 Bahadur, we see filmmakers who seem to have derived their entire conception of war from other war films, which is why the story here — despite being about remarkable Indian soldiers — is utterly unoriginal and unremarkable. The Chinese characters seem plucked straight out of a lame soap opera, while the Indian soldiers feel taken from a mushy TV serial. The real Major Shaitan Singh must have carefully, rigorously, and at times even spontaneously planned his troops' every move to overpower the Chinese soldiers. That sense of planning, pressure, and intelligence is missing from the Major Shaitan Singh we see in 120 Bahadur. The problem isn't just that Akhtar looks like a theater student trying to impress his professor; it's also Ghai's handling of the character, as he uses Shaitan—and even the other characters—as pawns subservient to his uninspiring vision.
By reducing the soldiers to a bunch of unidimensional clichés, Ghai has made a film that observes history from the outside. Much like a blue-tick Twitter pundit offering armchair commentary on war, Ghai turns an inspiring event into a video-game-like spectacle. He's more excited by the sight of bodies flying in the air due to bombs, RPGs, and explosions. He also inserts some unbroken shots that foreground a fight's choreography, not its pain or physical impact. Ghai, in the end, doesn't so much salute the brave soldiers as ask us to salute his "pretty piece of work." 120 Bahadur is made by a man enamored with himself.
Final Score- [2.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times