‘Tejas’ movie review: Kangana Ranaut’s surgical strike goes kaput

Debutant Sarvesh Mewara’s lacklustre narrative in ‘Tejas’ has all gas and little substance, letting down the versatile actor in Kangana Ranaut

In her effort to accomplish everything that a male star does, Kangana Ranaut is losing the plot. After Dhaakad, she is once again the driving force of a vehicle that refuses to take off. Low on logic and high on ham, debutant Sarvesh Mewara’s Tejas is a lacklustre effort to promote nationalist feelings and trust in women officers in combat operations that feels more like a shoddily put-together advertisement of new India than a piece of inspirational cinema. Coming from the producers of Uri: The Surgical Strike, it is a sloppy follow-up that neither works as an action film nor manages to sustain the emotional swell.

In this version, the insubordination of Wing Commander Tejas Gill (Kangana Ranaut), named after the light combat aircraft, in a rescue mission is entrusted with a more dangerous assignment to free an Indian spy from the clutches of some fanatic Islamists. Such films require a bunch of strong antagonists, but such is the makers’ devotion to the lead actor that Mewara has crafted a series of cardboards in Pakistan and Afghanistan that almost give a walkover to Kangana without even putting up a semblance of a fight. The only update is that the target this time is the upcoming Ram Temple in Ayodhya. Part of the footage might work as WhatsApp forwards in days of political fever, but for now, they don’t add up as an engaging film.

Like the multi-role fighter aircraft, Kangana pilots the narrative in multiple avatars. Every time the seniors are in a spot their eyes start searching for Tejas in the room. Things get so obvious that even the mission to bring back our guy is also called Operation Tejas. Veterans like Ashutosh Vidyarthi and Suneet Tandon try to bring creases on the forehead to make the mission look serious but are rendered redundant by the wafer-thin plot. Mewara employs several flashbacks to spice up the straitjacketed storyline but his manoeuvrers fail to ignite interest.

Known to play her part with conviction, Kangana delivers an uneven performance here. Reduced to a model for female aspirants, Mewara has focussed more on her aviators and swagger on the tarmac than generating breathtaking action in the air. In between, her one-liners on a soldier’s selfless service and women’s empowerment feel more like bullet points of a television interview than a seamless narrative. The only exceptions are Varun Mitra as Tejas’s romantic interest and Anshul Chauhan as her co-pilot. The two seem to have all the fun in the limited screen time when Kangana seems to have been weighed down by a gust of air.

Tejas is currently running in theatres