URI: The Surgical Strike

Uri: The Surgical Strike is a fitting tribute to the Indian Army starring Vicky Kaushal, Yami Gautam, Paresh Rawal and Mohit Raina after flopped 2018 I wasn't expecting much from URI as first movie of 2019 but to my surprise I have no second thought saying as it is one of superhit of 2019 and will save it position to the top of list by the end of year too.
Director Aditya Dhar focuses on the events of September 2016 wherein 19 jawans lost their lives in a brazen terror attack on the Indian military town of Uri in Jammu and Kashmir, prompting the Indian government to conduct a surgical strike on terrorist launchpads in Pakistan occupied Kashmir.
Uri on the whole keeps you engaged despite some clunky passages. It’s always good to have movies in which the soldiers look real, even if the action is buoyed by such dialogues as ‘unhe Kashmir chaihye, humein unka sar’.

But because this is a Bollywood film, we get a hand-to-hand combat moment for our hero Major Vihaan Shergill (Kaushal). How else are we to appreciate his bravery? The major and his derring-do commando unit, which includes Captain Karan Kashyap (Raina), spearheads the surgical strikes, and we get a Hollywood-influenced build up: chatter amongst war-room strategists, those who are in-charge of advanced weaponry, and the men who give the orders. A young wet-behind-the-ear nerd and his ‘creation’ causes an old warhorse to say: son, you may have won us the war. Straight out of a Hollywood flick. The female characters, apart from the ailing mum (Sampat), are sketchy, one playing a sleuth (Gautam), another a helicopter pilot (Kulhari), there to support the hero, though it’s nice to see no overt song-and-dance romantic overtones: again, so Hollywood.

Drone technology and sophisticated night-vision devices are all very well but we still can’t have a full-grown hero who doesn’t do ‘do-do haath’ with the baddie. Kaushal is satisfactorily bulked out and does a competent job, as does Raina, with the former getting, expectedly, more screen time to rattle his sabre.

picture credit: bookmyshow