Heroes is a Bollywood movie and a jingoistic attempt at a military recruitment campaign. A fatuous, blustering, simple minded melodramatic mess that could be called a Top Gun ripoff were it not so insufferably sentimental and unintentionally hilarious.
It also features one of the most awesomely tasteless fight scenes ever filmed, in which a paraplegic man takes offence at another man pawing his wife while dancing with her and proceeds to decimate the man and his gaggle of no good friends. From a prone position on the floor he smashes, gurns, mugs and CGIs his way through the mob, occasionally pumping his fist straight through the floor tiles for good measure. He swings men around by their ankles and throws them into corners of the room! It is fist-gnawlingly bad. This scene is acted out by Sunny Deol, the fatter of the two Deol brothers, who also wears a sculpted hairstyle like he just stepped out of a salon. In 1952. After asking for ‘a Mulligan and O’Hare, please’.
Later in the film, while chasing after two — possibly imaginary — fighter aircraft in his wheelchair on a rugged mountain road, he stops, momentarily beaten, and shaking his fist in the air he curses the immortal curse, “Damn these legs!”
God only knows how Preity Zinta ended up in the film, although her effortless professionalism is the only thing stopping anyone walking out after half an hour. She cooks! She drives a tractor! She’s ‘the man of the house’! Her sympathetic Punjabi war widow is a moment of calm and clarity in a loud and ignorant film.
A pretence is made of a plot: two film students deliver letters from dead servicemen to their families and learn the value of working for their country. The film goes on to repeat ad nauseum the vacuous statement meant to drive the youth into recruitment centres all over the country, “I’m just doing my job. Looking after the country.” The fact that the majority of the Indian army are paid above average wages as stark consolation for spending the best years of their lives sitting in freezing cold mountainside Nissen huts is more likely to drive kids to sign up than the amorphous notion of “defending the nation”. In India, a country so broad and diverse there exists little shared concept of a integral country anyway.
The bitter reality is alluded to in the final scene, years later when the pair of film school dropouts have grown up. Having failed, twice, to pass the army entrance exams (although this, surely, must be stretching credibility somewhat) the two go on instead, in a finale meant to inspire admiration, to open a school! That’s right, having failed to convince the authorities that they have the necessary courage, bravado and intelligence to sit on a crate halfway up the Himalayas counting the visiting tourists in and out of Sikkim, the boys resort instead to molding and shaping the young minds of the future. A truly scary thought.
Whoever made this dross should be ashamed of themselves.
