‘Border 2’ review: Exceedingly long 1971 War film has little new to offer

It’s rare to see Hindi cinema offer up this neat a contrast. Three weeks ago, Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis, a film on the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War, released in theatres. This weekend, Anurag Singh’s Border 2, also set during the 1971 War, opens in time for Republic Day. Ikkis is an interrogation of the modern Hindi war film, cheerfully swatting away stereotypes. Border 2, on the other hand, throws itself frequently on the live grenade of cliché, a martyr’s death for original thinking every scene.

This might be a bit harsh on Border 2, which is emotion-stuffed, occasionally exciting, and less virulent than the average Hindi war film. But Singh and co-writer Sumit Arora seem hemmed in by the legacy of J.P. Dutta's film, a huge hit in 1997, and by the responsibility of crafting a vehicle for a safety-first star like Sunny Deol. So we get songs and ideas and even hologram-like apparitions from the first film, and a fresh supply of stoic wives and teary mothers and soldiers giving up precious rations to keep a diya burning. It’s not unwatchable but it’s pretty unremarkable, and, as three hours and 20 minutes tick away, exhausting.

The internet trolls who accused Ikkis of glossing over Pakistan’s sins in Bangladesh in ’71 shouldn't be any happier with Border 2, which is also set on the western front and is only interested in Indian soldiers and their families. After the briefest of preambles, we’re dropped into a simmering conflict about to explode on multiple fronts. There’s Lt Col Fateh Singh Kaler (Sunny Deol) and Major Hoshiar Singh Dahiya (Varun Dhawan) with their battalions on land, and Fg Offr Nirmal Jit Singh Sekhon (Diljit Dosanjh) and Lt Cdr M.S. Rawat (Ahan Shetty) defending by air and sea respectively. Though they’re fighting separately in ‘71, there’s an extended, largely comic flashback with the three younger soldiers at the military academy and Fateh Singh as their strict instructor.

The decision to have protagonists spread across locations and battles is useful in giving a sense of the expanse of this conflict. But Singh doesn’t do a clear enough job explaining why the posts being captured or held are vital to the overall effort; every skirmish is presented like it might decide the war. The splitting up of the central quartet also means the film is less focused than Border, which zeroed in on one company. Border 2 only manages this successfully with Hoshiar Singh’s men, whom we spend enough time with, and are interesting enough, that we're invested when they're eventually laying down their lives.

Hoshiar himself has a sweet romance with his new wife (Medha Rana); in a nice comic touch, the ambiguous sher he quotes in a letter makes her think he’s dying. Mona Singh, playing Fateh Singh’s brave but worried wife, is the only other significant female role; Sonam Bajwa, paired with Dosanjh, can barely fake interest in the two scenes she’s in. Like Border, this is a film about men serving their country, and women serving men who do so.

A smartly worked-out action sequence at the start with land mines, retreating Pakistani soldiers and an advancing Sunny Deol was encouraging, though I revised my expectations after the first scenes of aerial and naval combat. Shaky CGI pretty much ruins Rawat’s submarine standoffs and Sekhon’s dogfights. But the action on land is generally strong. Deol is his usual indestructible self, though I preferred the sequences with the younger, more mobile Dhawan. There’s a couple of scenes of messy fighting in trenches by Hoshiar and his men that are as exciting as anything seen before in an Indian war film.

Apart from a gratuitous shot of a soldier’s head taken clean off, Border 2 doesn’t have the nasty edge of some recent combat films. Of course, Deol spends most of the runtime yelling hoarsely, but little (from what I could decipher) was overly spicy. There’s some unnecessary poking and prodding: a drive-by on the Mughals, a few too many uses of ‘halaal’ by Pakistani soldiers, another blanket charge of cowardice after Dhurandhar (this time Hindustan, not Hindus). I expect this and more from a Hindi war film. I only wish there were more touches like General Yahya Khan playing a Noor Jehan record in a meeting with his chiefs.

Dutta’s film—the same war but a different battle, fleetingly referenced—looms large over Border 2. ‘Sandese Aate Hain’ and ‘Toh Chalun’ are reproduced wholesale; I can’t imagine the scenes if they’d reused ‘Mere Dushman Mere Bhai’. Border established the rules and tenor of the chest-thumping Hindi combat film, as Lakshya (2004) some years later would define the more personal war narrative. Ikkis is a continuation of Lakshya’s ideas but also a challenge to Border and its unruly progeny. Border 2, on the other hand, offers a whole lot of nothing new.