Akshay Kumar In A Patchy, Inconsistent Film

A high-potential but medium-yield genre exercise that shines a light on two heroes of the 1965 India-Pakistan war, Sky Force picks broad details from the pages of military history and fictionalises them with an eye on maximising dramatic impact.

The heightened rendition of true events works only intermittently. Its narrative trajectory does not send the film soaring into the stratosphere nor does it help it land with the kind of force one would expect from a war movie of this scale and nature. But there is just enough in here for the film not to be deemed a failed sortie.

If anything, Sky Force, directed by Sandeep Kewlani and Abhishek Anil Kapur, comes into its own only in the second half. It devotes an entire hour to a segment designed to showcase a squadron of fighter pilots. Their exploits and exchanges are drowned out by the din of a gratuitously loud, persistent background score and the never-ending roar of the flying machines caught in dogfights.

Sky Force tends to miss the grain for the chaff in the first half. It loses its way in a surfeit of computer-generated air combat sequences. In this exhausting stretch, it displays little sense of what is important to the story. Most of it is either overly blurry or unduly blustery.

The script does dwell upon the mentor-protege relationship between an intrepid Indian Air Force officer Om Ahuja (Akshay Kumar) and a young, enthusiastic fighter pilot T. Krishna Vijaya (debutant Veer Pahariya) who is prone to paying heed more to his heart than to the orders of his superiors. It stops short of delving deeper into the clash of personalities and two conflicting approaches to the call of duty.

It chooses far less significant things – the affected swag of the two men, for instance – to focus on. The human story centred on the families of the two fighter pilots is granted little space until the pregnant wife of one of the two men finds herself face to face with the human cost of war.

Scripted by Kewlani, Aamil Keeyan Khan and Niren Bhatt, Sky Force wastes one half of its runtime on sound and fury minus the excitement. The visceral thrust falls flat because it isn’t sufficiently tempered with elements that could sharpen the edges and help the film cut deep.

Once the deafening hurly-burly of the aerial action is behind it, Sky Force doubles down to piecing together the story of a young fighter pilot’s disappearance in enemy territory during an Indian Air Force (IAF) retaliatory mission to strike at the heart of Pakistan’s air power in 1965.

Akshay Kumar, cast as a tough and brave IAF officer charged with leading Squadron 1, the force’s oldest squadron, mutates into a sleuth determined to find out what happened to the exceptionally skilled and maverick pilot he groomed and took under his wings.

The search and its outcome lend the film much-needed emotional traction. However, it is way too late in coming, which takes much away from the overall upshot of the big reveal at the end of the film. No revelation can take us by surprise because the true story that has inspired< Sky Force is in the public domain. A better build-up would have made a difference.

The first half suffers the ill effects of abysmal sound design and mixing. The sonic boom of fighter planes taking off and piercing the air and the excessive use of background music make words and conversations either completely inaudible or unintelligible.

What one gathers amid the relentless cacophony is that a band of men known as “The Tigers” – that is the name that the Squadron went by as a collective – are tasked with avenging a stealthy night time attack by Pakistan on two Indian airbases.

It is seen as an unequal contest. In 1965, Pakistan had supersonic fighter planes supplied by the Americans. India’s subsonic bombers were markedly inferior in efficacy and speed. That did not stop Squadron 1 from launching a quick and precise attack on the key Pakistani airbase in Sargodha to neutralise the nation’s entire fleet of Starstriker F-104s (Lockheed Starfighters with a fictional name).

But before the film stages this historic airstrike, independent India’s first-ever on enemy territory, it makes its way through several other Dassault Mystere sorties designed to show the audience that it isn’t the firepower of the fighter planes, but the fire in the bellies of the men flying them, that determines success.

Sky Force expends too much time trying to substantiate that adage beyond any doubt. That purpose is served but little that the characters say to each other rises above the noise levels.

Amid the bombast, one gathers that the Ahuja (Akshay Kumar) has a wife (Nimrat Kaur) and a pilot-brother he lost in combat. Flying Officer Vijaya’s (Veer Pahariya) wife is pregnant. The couple is confident that the baby will be a girl. If only the women were not as peripheral as they are, Sky Force would have been a different film.

The war film gives way to an investigative drama that sees the protagonist fly across the world for clues and information. The case of a lost pilot forgotten for nearly two decades is reopened and a new chapter is added to the story of the strike on Sargodha.

Sky Force opens in December 1971 in the course of the India-Pakistan war for the liberation of Bangladesh. A veteran Pakistani fighter pilot (Sharad Kelkar) is shot down in Indian territory. The provisions of the Geneva Conventions are invoked and the prisoner of war is treated with utmost respect. “There is honour among enemies,” says Wing Commander Ahuja.

These are words we do not hear in Bollywood war movies anymore. By echoing emotions that transcend enmity in military conflict, the film offers a throwback to a gentler time in which in the heat of war and beyond it soldiers held on to their humanity.

In an era in which bellicosity is the rule rather than the exception – a flash or two of standard jingoism creeps in here, too – Sky Force emphasises the dignity of warriors and humans, be they comrades or foes.

Sky Force is patchy, the acting is adequate – Akshay Kumar is obviously the fulcrum around which the rest of the cast revolves – and the quality of the storytelling inconsistent.

The film ends on a high note. Moreover, at 125 minutes, it isn’t as punishingly long as such action films usually are. But that certainly need not be the only reason why you might want to watch the film and recommend it to friends.