Phantom

D Day from Nikhil Adwani and Baby from Neeraj Pandey are the two ambitious and successful movies that were made on the premises of various terror attacks India had to face. Kabir Khan’s new movie Phantom starring Saif Ali Khan and Katrina Kaif, tries to follow the same pattern but the kind unconvincing series of events that happens in the movie makes it quite underwhelming and thus this thriller is less patriotic and more heroism oriented.

The movie is based on the terror attack on 26/11 at Mumbai. The plot is presented as India’s tit for tat way of revenge. RAW decides to do an unofficial operation to punish the culprits behind the massacre. Daniyal Khan, a disgraced military officer has been assigned to do this chain of murders. How he along with a private associate Nawaz Mistry (Katrina’s character) manages to do all these operations is what Phantom dealing with.

Even though they were fictions, D Day and Baby had that crisp making style which made us feel that “Hope This was for real!” – Yah! Somewhat similar to Phantom’s tag line. But when it comes to Phantom, we completely forget the fact that he has this soldier backdrop that made him commit to this mission. And the Rambo model one man show heroics looks too unreal that when Daniyal finally sinks like Jack Dawson, you wont feel much of a patriotic emotion. The sensibility of the other major killings is also quite questionable and Kabir Khan this time fails to make all those strategies look convincing.

Saif Ali Khan doesn’t have much of a serious acting to do and most of his hard work is in doing the dusty fights and chroma screen car chase sequences. Katrina Kaif also delivers a low key performance with her Hindi accent. Rest of the cast were okay with their performances.

Kabir Khan seems to have treated the movie in a dull way. The series of killings he visualizes in the movie has some significance as it had to do with real life circumstances and characters. But the screenplay is so commercial that the ways Daniyal kills the culprits will make the entire Indian intelligence look like a bunch of inefficient people. I wasn’t expecting such a reaction and suggestion from officers in RAW regarding such a mission. The cinematography was nice and the edits are okay. The songs don’t really get their emotional significance due to the less powerful visualization.

So to sum it up, Phantom isn’t that perfect to engross you with entertainment or patriotism. The sort of mission impossible feel keeps the movie running but the impact it should have created was different. The rating for the movie is 2.5/5.