Boiling blood? Patriotic tingles? I found the first-person shooter efficiency exhausting after a while. The final assault, conducted in the dead of night on Pakistani soil, is a serrated knife of a set piece.Yet, as one terrorist after another is shot, stabbed or blown up, you have to ask yourself what the film hopes this is inducing in the viewer. So confident is Dhar in the power of patriotic revenge as a narrative hook that he barely creates a villain (the closest the film comes to caricature is casting someone with a hooked nose and flowing hair as the leader of the Uri attack). Uri doesn’t seem to consider that his brother-in-law’s death might have some effect on Vihaan’s judgment as a leader.Instead, the film conflates desire for retribution on an individual and a national level. “Is your blood boiling for revenge?" he thunders at his men. Vihaan, who’d quit active military duty after the Myanmar border mission to look after his mother (you better believe someone compares serving one’s mother and one’s motherland), returns to lead the surgical strikes. In an election year, this is the kind of gift money can’t buy. ![]() A surgical prime minister, and an accidental one, in theatres this week. Though he isn’t identified by name, Prime Minister Modi (Rajit Kapur in spectacles and a white beard) appears in several scenes as a hands-on commander. This, too, has the suggestion of a new India: individuals and institutions doing whatever it takes to get the job done. The interrogation scene is over in a flash – two suspects tortured, the desired information elicited. Suddenly, we’re checking in with the Indian Space Research Organisation, the Defence Research and Development Organization, a belching Indian mole in Pakistan. Uri resembles Zero Dark Thirty in its factual build-up to the Indian strike, but because the terrorist attack only comes halfway through, the film then has to rush through scenes of surveillance, intel- gathering, spy work and training. Vicky Kaushal is a fetching stoic lead, but Vihaan is so close to perfect he’s scarcely real. None of the characters have any definition beyond their job – they’re just military men and women or relatives. Dhar’s writing is fine for military speech, but flat in conversations which don’t consist of barked commands. Yet, it also becomes increasingly clear that whenever the film moves away from the battlefield, it doesn’t have the same edge. The Uri attack is again brilliantly executed – the shot that tracks Karan as he races across the camp belongs in a Katherine Bigelow movie. ![]() It’s completed by the jawans, and her grief is weaponised. Standing over his body, crying, rain pouring down, she yells out a war cry he taught her. The child’s father, Karan (Mohit Raina) – Vihaan’s brother-in-law – is killed in the Uri attack. His sister corrects her daughter’s homework, telling her it’s “more peaceful", not “peacefuler". Vihaan’s mother’s Alzheimer’s is “aggressively spreading". Even the household conversations have a militaristic sound to them. Uri is wartime filmmaking: taut, clipped, muscular, regimented. Raazi, a spy thriller released last year, was peacetime filmmaking: character-driven, invested in the subtleties of language, willing to admit that there can be good people on both sides of a cross- border conflict.
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