‘Shershaah’ movie review: A well-made war drama bathed in familiarity

A biopic on the Kargil War hero Captain Vikram Batra, ‘Shershaah’ is not entirely a bad film but is plagued by the ordinariness of the war films we have been accustomed to

About an hour into Shershaah, we get a scene carved out of the screenplay book of every Indian film. Or rather, every film that wants to extract tears in whichever way possible. It goes like this: Vikram Batra (Sidharth Malhotra) and his comrade Bansi (Anil Charanjeett) are on night patrol in Jammu and Kashmir, where they are posted on the sidelines of a brewing war with Pakistan, and the duo has a heart-to-heart conversation. Bansi shows a picture of his daughter, Durga, and says that he will carry her in his arms for the first time, when he goes home post-war. Affected by Bansi’s choice of words, Batra melts and promises to open an FD in his daughter’s name, to secure a future for her. If you are an average cinema viewer, you sense from a mile that it is a cue to finish off the character. What truly takes you by surprise is, it does not happen in the aforementioned scene but three minutes later. It is also the sort of death that would change the belief system of the hero, Vikram Batra. For instance, he says to his fellow officer Captain Sanjeev Jamwal (Shiv Pandit), that nobody will ever die on his watch, when he becomes a commanding officer. “The bullet had my name,” he remarks, about the bullet Bansi takes for him.