A pacy grace envelopes Kabir Khan’s new political thriller. You can almost smell the tension in the air. If Bajrangi Bhaijaan was an agreeable gentle cup of lemon time, Phantom is the bracing, percolating morning cup of coffee that makes you jump out of your bed and seize the day. Kabir’s second film in six weeks after the epic success of Bajrangi Bhaijaan takes an aggressive what-if stand against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. It does so with a cool candour that makes for a bracing, jolting wake-up call for the two nations at a proxy war, rattling sabres across the barbed fence.
Phantom works on a simple premise. You give us 26/11. We take revenge. As simple as that. In many ways, the very talented Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, playing a raw RAW agent (no, I am not stammering), represents the voice of the nation. His inexperience among veterans who plot and plan the nation’s defense and security actually becomes an asset for an organization that is seriously tempted to dodge the rules to take revenge against those who perpetrated 26/11 on us.
Many episodes in this breathy vendetta spree read like chapters from a pulp thriller. Which they are. Kabir’s film is a novel on celluloid, unfolding in enrapturing episodes as a bunch of Indian intelligence officers supersede their line of duty to overthrow terrorists. The anarchy of extremism lurks in tantalizing pockets of Kabir’s film, like those James Bond girls dancing in the opening credits in shimmering, seductive silhouettes.
Kabir plays hide ‘n’ seek with our perceptions of international politics. Right and wrong interchange places with provocative insouciance until we are left staring at a film that tells us vigilante justice is not just a Charles Bronson fantasy. It can also be extended to the searing issue of global radicalism, provided the aggrieved government finds a man crazy and committed enough to do a vigilante’s version of Dharmendra’s ‘Kuttey, main tera khoon pi jaoonga.’
Our man for the job of avenging 26/11 is Saif Ali Khan. A man so cool and in control, he makes his adversaries in the spy ring seem like toddlers in a tizzy.
Saif plays it cool and in control. In his introductory sequence, Saif, playing disgraced army soldier Daniyal Khan, chases down a road rager in Chicago and plunges the man to his death from a bridge. All of this with a chilling absence of an emotional heft. And so it continues all through the film. Having Katrina play your chief ally doesn’t help. Katrina Kaif looks gorgeous even with soot on her fair cheeks. But that’s really not what we are looking for here. Don’t laugh. She is supposed to be Daniyal’s right-hand woman with great contacts in the terror world. It’s a role any actress aspiring to be noticed would grab and make her own.
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Not Katrina. Her character relies on aesthetic cotton dupattas demurely covering the head in Pakistan to blend with the locals. Whether fighting Syrian soldiers in Beirut or scampering through the narrow gullies of Karachi, Katrina remains a drop-dead distraction, quite the opposite of what she’s meant to be. And when she tries to act, as in the senile sequence where she must outwit Pakistani soldiers at the check post in her getaway car by pretending to be pregnant, Katrina embarrasses even the actors playing the cops who quickly let her pass.
Barring Zeeshan, who is remarkably convincing in his zealous patriotism, no performance really stands out. Aseem Mishra’s cinematography does. Stand out, I mean. And that’s not a good thing in a film where blending with the crowds is a must. The DOP shoots cities of such striking and antithetical beauty as Chicago, London and Beirut with lenses as flattering as the one used to shoot Katrina. Add to the film’s unnecessarily showy appearance Pritam’s atonal wedding Qawwali (the worst I’ve ever heard in my life). And we are looking at a film that could have gone drastically wrong in its execution of a political crisis.
The creative zest to tell a rock-solid story in a language that is both virile and sensitive comes from director Kabir Khan himself, who films S. Hussain Zaidi’s fantasy novel with a reliable quotient of compelling scenes and characters. Dark, sinister and utterly riveting, Phantom is a brave, ballsy thriller that yanks Kabir Khan eons away from the Arcadian idealism of Bajrangi Bhaijaan. There is a sense of growing panic in the narrative, as though time was running out. The last 20 minutes are specially riveting. The ending, where Katrina sits silhouetted against the Taj hotel in Mumbai sipping chai, is the only time her beautiful face comes to terms with the enormity of the tragedy that was 26/11.
Kabir Khan, who had two major releases in 2010 within a month, spoke to Subhash K. Jha. “I never treated Bajrangi Bhaijaan and Phantom as two films. Rather, it was like one big marathon from Bajrangi to Phantom since I was shooting them simultaneously. I didn’t allow myself to feel the pressure of two films. Phantom was not anti-Pakistan but anti-terrorism. Pakistan is even more traumatised by terror attacks than we are. Terrorists attacked little children in Peshawar some time ago. It can’t get any more brutal than that. Phantom talks about bringing the perpetrators of 26/11 Mumbai attacks to book. It is essentially saying the same thing about Indo-Pak relations that Bajrangi Bhaijaan did. Phantom is based on the book Mumbai Avengers. Saif Ali Khan plays an army officer seeking revenge on the terrorists who masterminded the 26/11 attack on Mumbai. Bajrangi Bhaijaan, on the other hand, stars Salman Khan, a Bajrang Bali devotee, trying to find the home of a lost little girl across the border. Bajrangi Bhaijaan and Phantom are two completely different films. While BB is a full-on masala film with lots of music, Phantom has no lip-sync songs even. It’s intended as a far more serious exploration of a political issue. There is no singing and dancing in Phantom. It would look very odd if Saif and Katrina took song breaks in this film. It is different from Bajrangi but we hope it’ll find the acceptance that BB did.”
After Phantom, Kabir Khan was assailed by protesters at the Karachi airport. “They kept on ranting about how I had shown Pakistan in a bad light in Phantom. Twice I tried to talk to them. But they were in no mood to listen. I don’t think they were interested in reasoning or rationale. It looked like they had come prepared to attack. They knew the time of my departure and were there all prepared for what they had to do. You can’t reason with the lunatic fringe. But I really don’t want to play into their hands. I am not going to get cowed down and be provoked into making statements against the country. Because the truth is, the common man is just not interested in any violence.”
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