Fighter finds Indian director / co-writer Siddharth Anand hot on the heels of 2023’s joyously dopey early-2000s-action homage Pathaan. He reteams with both Pathaan’s leading lady, Deepika Padukone, and Hrithik Roshan, who was Anand’s leading man in 2019’s War — which remains the century’s most delightfully, and almost overtly, homosexual smash-’em-up. (A side note: The YRF Spy Universe, which includes Pathaan, War and three films with Salman Khan as Tiger, is one of the most consistent action franchises in operation right now. Give it a shot.)
Aviation action is a market corner not yet explored by Indian filmmakers like Anand and co-writer Ramon Chibb. Clearly, they’re eager to carve out a piece post-Top Gun: Maverick. Anyone who has dipped one toe into Indian action cinema won’t be shocked that Fighter abandons Maverick’s anonymous approach to its aggressors. (Spoiler alert: They’re operating out of Pakistan.) The surprise is how Fighter’s jingle-jangle jingoism makes the original Top Gun look like Apocalypse Now. Even Pathaan left a little space for nuance, however perfunctory, in considering this real-world conflict. Fighter is a large, well-choreographed dance number that stomps out the line between state-sponsored terrorism and rogue actors.
One scene finds Roshan delivering a patriotic poem about the best type of coffin to fill while he enjoys a pizza. It’s repeated later by a supporting actor who endures a Passion-like pummeling while maintaining enough teeth and consciousness to scream “Jai Hind!” (or “long live India”). And if you thought either Top Gun film would’ve been vastly improved by Tom Cruise hanging from a helicopter to wave an American flag at a military grunt on a train who is also waving an American flag, well … perhaps buy one ticket to Fighter. Toss in a lot of unfortunate misogyny (which the script tries untangling in a deeply ridiculous speech from Roshan and dramatic moment with Padukone), a bit of fat-shaming and even a transphobic aside for bad measure. Rather than soar as rah-rah cinema, Fighter sours with regressive social stances.
Playing the hard-assed commanding officer, veteran actor Anil Kapoor insists his Air Dragons squadron is not a place for outsized egos and fancy stunts — a har-har moment underscored as Fighter mimics Maverick’s whoa-ho-ho climactic vertical stall-out at the 30-minute mark. There are very long stretches of this 166-minute film without any such moment to accelerate the pulse. But when it attempts that, Fighter generally proves Cruise right in his aesthetic approach on Maverick: Overly digitized aerial derring-do threatens to lose the audience altogether.
No one could reasonably expect Fighter to approximate the real-life lengths to which Cruise and company pushed the envelope. But a further concession to Fighter’s nationalism is an absence of the goofy go-for-broke energy of Pathaan or even the airborne Fast & Furious vibe to which it aspires. In other words: Had Fighter made no pretense to reality, you could more easily roll with its artifice. Although a final moment of hand-to-hand combat between Roshan and newcomer Rishabh Sawhney, as a terrorist with a Bond-like bloodshot eye, offers a viscerally exciting conclusion, it also feels flown in from a different film altogether. (Again, that film is Pathaan. Just watch that.)
Frankly, Anand’s film would fail altogether without its considerably fortified crutches of the collective star power from Roshan, Padukone and Kapoor, and a handful of banger musical numbers. Otherwise, it’s a formless and gormless flight right into a danger zone of drudgery.