Abhishek Anil Kapoor and Sandeep Kewlani’s ‘Sky Force’, starring Akshay Kumar, is a not-bad watch based on a great true-life story

The USP of India’s first airstrike forms the basis of the film. But what makes it stand out is the moving drama that follows. The rest of this review contains spoilers.

Early on in Sky Force, in a scene set in 1971, Wing Commander Om Ahuja (Akshay Kumar) gets a call about the capture of a Pakistani pilot (played with great dignity by Sharad Kelkar). He goes to the cell where this pilot is being held, and what happens is a pleasant surprise in a genre where we typically see jingoism and chest-thumping. Om says that the pilot may be a prisoner of war, but he is first a soldier. There’s respect. There are barbs, too, but these barbs are traded with dignity. India may be at war with Pakistan, but these two men realise they are doing the same job. Off the battleground – that is, the skies – there is no reason civility cannot prevail. If the scenes with these two are surprising, so is the larger story. It is something you don’t see coming.

Sky Force goes back to 1965, to Adampur, where pilots are training under Om Ahuja’s supervision. The writing is pretty generic, and it very quickly singles out TK Vijaya, aka Tabby (Veer Pahariya). Tabby is the daredevil, the stud, the breaker of rules. In a classroom, Om Ahuja asks what a pilot should do if he is chasing an enemy plane and running out of fuel. Tabby proposes going after the enemy at all costs and gunning him down. Om says it’s better to disengage, so you have enough fuel to return and fight another day. This, in essence, is what these two people are. This role is not a stretch for Akshay, but he sells it well enough. And newcomer Veer Pahariya is good at projecting macho patriotism. He is less sure in his scenes with his wife, played by Sara Ali Khan, who’s clad in Kanjeevaram sarees and supposed to depict a generic “South Indian”.

There are some major missteps and lost opportunities. A song sequence that has Om Ahuja hanging from a chandelier is downright ridiculous. There’s a mention of a brother killed in war, and this could have been used to build the character better. Nimrat Kaur has no shades to play. As Om Ahuja’s wife, she just stands around looking pretty and overdressed all the time. The aerial action, the staging, the visual effects, the writing, the rock concert-like background score – everything’s less than what you want from a big production. It’s all functional, and it doesn’t take the film to the level of greatness that this story deserves. But I guess the directors Abhishek Anil Kapoor and Sandeep Kewlani just wanted to make an easy, generic watch that runs about two hours. In that regard, one must say: mission accomplished.

For a while, Sky Force is exactly what you expect when you hear the description that it’s about India’s first airstrike. Pakistan is getting aggressive with American aircraft (the brand-new fighter planes are like a missile with a man). India’s peace-loving government does not want to engage, but after a major airstrike that wipes out an airbase, India has no option but to retaliate. You think this action (the “India’s first airstrike” that’s the USP of the film) will occupy the rest of the narrative, but – surprise, surprise – this retaliatory mission is accomplished a little after the interval point. What forms the rest of the film is the heart of this incident – and while it pains your heart a little that a better movie wasn’t made from this great premise, I was happy someone at least discovered it and put it on a screen and let the rest of us know this strange story about a man whose name, so far, was lost in the pages of history.

Usually, in war films, we get the drama first – all the character-establishing, all the intrigue, all the planning – and then we move to full-on action that builds on this drama. Sky Force is a little different, in that we get the action first and then we move to the major drama of what happened to Tabby after the Indian airstrike. I was deeply moved by this final stretch, which turns into something of a mystery that has to be solved by the only person still interested in that mystery: Om Ahuja. This part of the story involves globe-trotting, a book, a mysterious second pilot, and even a reference to aviation technology. Had this not been a true story (based on Squadron Leader AB Devayya), we’d have dismissed it as impossible. Why wasn’t this fantastic final stretch worked more into the movie? That’s the bigger mystery. But maybe they felt aerial battles would pull in more audiences than a slow-burn investigation. And maybe they’re right.

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