Paltan film review: Is it any good?

Gulf News

The war movie veteran JP Dutta’s take on a little known event lacks clarity, and authenticity. The take away from Director JP Dutta’s long-winded drama, Paltan, is that wars are an exercise in futility. See more at: http://gulfnews.com/videos

Transcript

00:00Let me bite the bullet and just state it, that there's not much redeeming in this film.

00:10I've just been to watch director J.P. Dutta's Bollywood war drama called Paltan.

00:16It stands at a length of 170 minutes, so expect a very long-winded, tedious, bland watch of a war drama.

00:24There are actors such as the national award-winning talent like Arjun Rampal, Sonu Sood, Harshvardhan Rane,

00:31Gurmeet Choudhury, Lav Sinha, etc., in the same frame. And when an actor like Arjun Rampal is

00:39given lines that either rhyme, even the most talented of actors may not be able to do

00:47great justice to it. I think somewhere along the line, Arjun Rampal has fallen short because he's

00:53given lines such as, no guts, no glory, no legends, no story. That's one of the samples. There are so

01:00many in the film and it's hard to recollect, but they're very forgettable lines, that much I can tell you.

01:04All the Indian soldiers in this movie called Paltan is uniformly good. There's not a mean bone in

01:11their body, which does not make for riveting cinema, if you look at it. If Arjun Rampal as the

01:17platoon leader, Rai Singh, is great at giving rousing speeches, he's generally a good guy,

01:24he's a good man. So is Sonu Sood, so is Gurmeet Choudhury's character, so is Harshvardhan Rane's

01:29character. Here's Harshvardhan Rane's character, who fights for us and guards the border, but in

01:36his downtime during his holidays with his parents, he tends to the fields. And there's even a scene

01:41where the parents are talking about how great their son is. So that's one of the, you know,

01:47one of the factors that kind of was grating, because how is it that all the characters in

01:52this film are stock or unidimensional. You expect a war film to be torture porn. I mean, you will see

01:59a lot of blood, etc. But what I did not expect it to be was torso porn. If you look at it, there is

02:06actually a scene of Harshvardhan Rane, who is doing push-ups along with Gurmeet Choudhury,

02:11both of them fit Indian soldiers doing push-ups in the snow, they don't care for the snow,

02:15they're shirtless. And the way they cool down is with taking flecks of snow and rubbing it

02:21on their chest. For a minute, we were a bit confused about are they models or are they

02:26soldiers? Whereas the Chinese soldiers, they look out of shape, they're stout. And even if we had

02:32Arjun Rampal as a platoon leader, we have on the Chinese side, a person, an actor who's very

02:38rotund, out of shape and almost comical. I feel there is some sort of vanity discrimination

02:44happening right then and there. Somehow, I think director JP Dutta wanted to control the pro-India

02:51narrative by dissing the Chinese. It did not work too well. I think what makes a good war film is

02:56when an adversary is equally powerful. Somewhere along the way, Chinese, although more powerful

03:01at that point, had more soldiers, more foot soldiers and more artillery, somehow did not

03:07come across as a stronger one. It was always that Indian men had everything in control,

03:12there were no underdogs there. Of all the characters who leave an impression, I would say

03:17is Harshvardhan Rane's character. His bit about his love life, along with his personal equation

03:24with his parents, kind of strike a chord in you. But on the whole, none of the characters really

03:30grow with you, nor do you feel invested in them at any point. I know war dramas are not supposed

03:35to have a lot of emotions going for it, but when these soldiers have a tendency to reminisce about

03:41their personal lives, therefore making a mishmash of both an emotional and a war drama, you expect

03:47a sort of emotional connect and that is missing in Palton. I have given this film 1.5 out of 5.

03:56For the full review, go to gulfnews.com slash tabloid.

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