Shershaah, regardless of how successful it is, but somewhere it hits that it can’t help but flow off the war hero’s natural fieriness with a distinct dollop of vanilla.
A must-aware dialogue "Ye Dil Mange More" played by actor Abhishek Bachchan in the movie LOC Kargil as Vikram Batra went so viral and heart touching that again on the occasion of Independence day, a movie named Shershaah is released on an OTT platform.
A film on Martyred Vikram Batra, who didn’t need an inciting incident to inspire him; he didn’t come from a family of war veterans; and for as far back as he could remember, all he wanted to do was become a ‘fauji’. Based on his short but stirring life, director Vishnu Varadhan’s Kargil War drama Shershaah, out on Amazon Prime Video, is a sincere film undone by a shoehorned romantic subplot and a script that`s terrified of scraping beneath the surface.
This looks so promising
— Garima Sharma (@Iamgarimasharma) August 7, 2021
Quite excited to watch this one https://t.co/0UAY0DZ4BE
Just as caste prejudice gets in the way of Captain Batra’s relationship with his college sweetheart Dimple Cheema, Kiara Advani’s Punjabi accent gets in the way of her acting. We know that she is talented; we saw her deliver a fine performance in last year’s Guilty. But Vishnu’s overall bungling of Captain Batra’s personal life story suggests that the actors aren’t to blame, although a few more sessions with the dialect coach (if there even was one) wouldn’t have hurt.
Their scenes together don’t work. The accents are all over the place and the dialogue is clunky. Dimple is supposed to be a ‘sardarni’ from Chandigarh, but sounds like she’s placing an order at Bastian. Captain Batra, played by Sidharth Malhotra, is from Palampur, but talks like he’s just finished two semesters at DU. “Thand rakh kudiye,” he tells her in a scene, with the sort of energy that almost makes you expect a ‘burrrrah’ next.
Shershaah’s ‘character moments’ come across as an afterthought. Once he’s off to war, the pace picks up, and his interactions with Dimple no longer require either of them to open their mouths. Instead, they rely almost entirely on sending ‘sandesas’ to each other. This works out well for all of us, actors included.
Captain Batra, as played by Malhotra, makes friends quickly, both in his battalion and among the Kashmiris that he shares cups of kahwa with on his first posting. His brothers in arms warn him about getting too attached, but Captain Batra operates on instinct alone.
He always has a one-liner at the ready, the most famous example of which was his battlefield declaration of ‘yeh dil maange more’, a victory call that elevated a Pepsi slogan into an anthemic war cry for a nation. And then there was his spontaneous defense of Madhuri Dixit’s honor, delivered moments before a bullet to the enemy’s skull.
Director - Vishnu Varadhan
Cast - Sidharth Malhotra, Kiara Advani, Shiv Pandit, Nikitin Dheer
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