Even though the tone of the latest John Abraham starrer, The Diplomat, has that gallery-pleasing dialogue bazi element in it, it sort of feels fresh because it is taking an effort to walk away from the deafening patriotic tones we are seeing nowadays. The Diplomat, written by Ritesh Shah and directed by Shivam Nair, is not devoid of the cliches you would associate with a movie that has Pakistan and its bureaucracy on the opposite side. But like I said, it is not trying to be this fictional story where John Abraham is single-handedly flexing his muscles to get things done. The creative decision to present this as a collaborative effort makes it a passable thriller despite all the predictable beats.
Uzma Ahmed, a citizen of India who was in Pakistan, went to the Indian embassy there to seek help as she was getting tortured by her husband, who was a Pakistani. What we see in the movie The Diplomat are the complicated decisions the embassy head, JP Singh, had to make as the matter was extremely sensitive. How Uzma ended up in Pakistan and how JP and his team helped her in going back to her country is what we see in this film.
When you hear the name The Diplomat, and you see that John Abraham is starring in it, you would expect him to at least give a whack at someone at some point in the film. Apart from a very filmy moment where John’s character takes control of the wheels in a critical situation, there was absolutely no moment in the movie where the character felt like our typical hero. The fact that we don’t even get to see the forearms of someone like John Abraham, who is easily the most objectified male actor in Indian cinema, gives you an idea that the makers have that desire to make it a movie about the heroics of a group rather than the hero.
The movie is operating in a space where a lot of drama is happening in a span of three weeks. Ritesh Shah is trying to dramatize a lot of the things to make the whole setting not so easy for the Indian diplomats. A lot of the things that might have been easy for the real characters are getting that filmy tweak to make it one hurdle after another for the hero. The problem was that while some of it worked as smart moves, some of them were made smart by making the antagonists too dumb. On a script level, Ritesh Shah had to make sure that the process wasn’t easy, and at times, he opted for the extremely filmy ones. At one point towards the end, the main character JP, played by John Abraham, is telling the Indian authorities that Pakistan is just using delaying tactics, whereas it was actually the script that was delaying the climax.
As I already said, it is a movie that has no aspirations to show John Abraham as a man of muscle power, and the movie offers him a space to be a guy who handles situations with grace and composure. The moments in the movie where he smiles gently out of empathy had a pretty different impact, as we haven’t seen that side of John in a long time. Sadia Khateeb, as Uzma Ahmed, was able to portray the trauma of the main character effectively on screen. Revathy played the role of the then Foreign Affairs Minister, late Smt. Sushma Swaraj, and much like her portrayal of Shylaja Teacher in Virus, this one also felt like a softer version of the real person. Kumud Mishra, Sharib Hashmi, and a few more names are there in the supporting cast.
Shivam Nair, who previously helmed the Baby spin-off, Naam Shabana, is not trying to make it a very nuanced presentation of the story. The script opts for familiar tropes like putting the hero in a spot by making him think frequently about past traumas that happened as part of the job. The portion that showed the torture through which Uzma had to go through was depicted without vulgarity. The extreme close-ups of the eyes combined with the sound design really conveyed the horror of that situation. Towards the end, the film tries to emulate the urgency one would have seen in movies like Argo, and it works only in parts. The sentimental bits are on the louder side as cheesy dialogues are being used to motivate the character.
The Diplomat is based on a true story, and it is not a film where you wouldn’t be able to distinguish between the real and fiction. The rhetorics of characters, the fluttering flags, the predictable foolishness of the enemy, etc., are making it look like a diluted simplistic thriller. But some of these gallery-pleasing elements work in favor of the movie, and as I said, this one is a John Abraham movie where he is dealing with bad guys with diplomacy and smartness rather than biceps and bullets. It is a thriller that tries hard to be there in John’s body of work rather than using his body for the movie to work.
The creative decision to present this as a collaborative effort makes it a passable thriller despite all the predictable beats.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
