Major recreates the trauma and tragedy of the 26/11 attack on Mumbai, with a dashing bravado and ultra-cool performance by Adivi Sesh who makes his entry into Hindi cinema with a bang and a boom.
At a time when 55-year old superstars in Bollywood insist on playing 25-year old real-life heroes, here is a hero who looks like he can take on the world. The language used by director Sashi Kiran Tikka is purely mainstream, but the film never loses sight of its original goal: to celebrate the life of commanding officer Sandeep Unnikrishnan. The script (helmed by the film’s leading man Adivi Sesh) is a heady mix of reality and fantasy. The brew is intoxicating.
Another example of the Southern invasion? If we want to look at the recent triumph of movies from the South, particularly from Telugu cinema, as an invasion, so be it. At least this Dravidian dominance should serve as a wake-up call to Bollywood superstars who are rapidly losing their stronghold on the box office.
Adivi Sesh, a popular actor in Telugu cinema is the latest challenge to the status quo in Bollywood. He comes in Major with a certain confidence and freshness of attitude to the concept of screen heroism. His livewire execution of tough action sequences should make the Bollywood action heroes feel very very scared.
Adivi Sesh plays Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan who perished while trying to save the victims of the 26/11 siege of the Taj hotel in Mumbai. This is not the first film chronicling the brazen invasion from the neighbours(now that’s the invasion we should really be worried about). But it is most decidedly more engaging than Ram Gopal Varma’s The Attacks Of 26/11 or more recently Anthony Maras’ Hotel Mumbai.
Major doesn’t stick to the actual attack only. The diversionary tactics are welcome for a change. We get to enter the family life of Sandeep Unnikrishnan, his relationship with his parents (a rock-solid Revathy and Prakash Raj), his girlfriend (Saiee Manjrekar) and his childhood propensity to play the protector in private and political wars. It is shown to start off with domestic fights in the neighbourhood. Eventually, that protective instinct in Sandeep Unnikrishnan grew into an epic hankering to rectify terror-related injustice.
The narrative’s trigger-happy approach to the theme would have been offensive in lesser hands. The cynics would say, Major has sold itself off to commercialism, turned the real-life tragedy of terrorism into a big bustling Bollywood-styled entertainer.
Yes, Major does that. With major success, I might add. It is not interested in creating a dry-toned staccato docu-styled bio-pic on the truest true-life hero we’ve seen on screen in recent times. It wants to make Unnikrishnan larger than life. And it succeeds in doing so.
At a time when filmmakers in Bollywood are glorifying gangsters and other anti-social elements, Major brings us a bonafide hero. It packs in a solid punch delivering blow after blow in sequences that are designed to keep us on the edge of the seat.
While Major is predominantly a one-man show, the supporting characters are not purposely hazy to enhance the protagonist’s image. Visually flush, Major has an adept sound design where every gunshot hits us with a frontal impact. The editing (by Vinay Kumar Sirigineed and Kodati Pavan Kalyan) ensures audience’s attention doesn’t flag for even a fleeting glance at the phone.
There is one very cleverly edited sequence which juxtaposes the rescue commandos and the terrorists' interaction with terror victims in such a way that we are not sure who is speaking to whom until the guns go off. The action is reliably sound. The background score (by Sricharan Pakala) matches the epic scale of the action.
Who can come away from this experience without saluting the real Sandeep Unnikrishnan? No better tribute than this could have been masterminded by anyone.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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source https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/adivi-seshs-major-delivers-a-solid-blow-to-gangster-biopics-10752621.html
