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Star Cast: Alia Bhatt, Sharvari, Bobby Deol, Anil Kapoor
Director: Shiv Rawail
What’s Good: Hrithik Roshan in a cameo, background music, and action!
What’s Bad: Almost everything else!
Loo Break: Anytime you want! Even take a nap if you want.
Watch or Not?: No
Language: Hindi
Available On: Theatrical release
Runtime: 2 hours 21 Minutes
User Rating:
Most of the stories have the potential to turn into a good or a bad one! It all depends on how you align the characters and their arcs! But some stories do not have that potential. They start straight from the point of being bizarre, and they end at the same point! A lot of things happen in between, but the story does not make sense! That story is Alpha! Starring Alia Bhatt, Sharvari, and Bobby Deol, along with Anil Kapoor, this film starts at a bizarre point and religiously follows that bizarreness, not making sense even for a second!
The seventh installment of Spy Universe was to be celebrated as the first female-led spy thriller of the Universe, and to be honest, I was too excited. I generally get excited at such possibilities because then there is so much to explore in a new world. But here, director Shiv Rawail refurbishes the same world, putting two women as the only different thing!
But even by that standard, it should make sense, right? Because the previous installments of Tiger and War were gold, and so was Pathaan? So does Alpha belong to the same level? Well, even you know the answer. Everyone who belongs to the film knows the answer, and I wish there could have been some way that could have saved the Spy Universe from this downfall, because this one seems the final nail in the coffin!
Alpha Movie Review: Script Analysis
The story starts with the backstory. We follow the birth of Sita, a courageous girl who is trained to fight and fight endlessly! An Alpha potion has been developed that gives this girl superpowers. Human superpowers, of course! She can dive deeper, she can be underwater without oxygen, she does not need to see while fighting, and so can fight in the darkest part of the room! I mean, many superpowers, so to speak! But Sita is a stolen child. Stolen by Bobby Deol, an ex-Army Officer who believes that Sita belongs to the nation!
Now, who is Sita? Why is she an Alpha? Why did Anil Kapoor, another Army Officer, Sita’s father stole Alpha potion despite knowing it belonged to the nation? Why does Sita hate her sister Durga? And why is Bobby Deol the villain? All of this forms the two-hour narrative of the film, which, trust me, is illogical and bizarre!
Alpha Movie Review: Star Performance
It is genuinely painful to see an actress of Alia Bhatt’s caliber get trapped in a competition that should not belong to her in the first place! One might disagree, but her petite look does not suggest that she can throw ten huge men in a single fight! The absurdity does not end here. She walks into the frame eating French fries, and while this should have looked cool, it looks only absurd and a legit wannabe behavior. She pushes her body to the absolute limit. I mean, the poor woman is doing absolutely everything, running fiercely, lifting men, biking, kicking, punching, but it all feels so undercooked and underprepared!
Moreover, the dialogues completely fail her. You cannot look terrifying when your character is forced to state the obvious every five minutes. She keeps smiling and delivering those dialogues for no reason! Sharvari could have managed to do something here, if she would have been given something apart from picking up sticks and fighting Alia! Coming back to Alia, every single time she said Behen, I was pained! It neither worked as sarcasm nor as an emotion.
Following his antagonist run in Animal and Aashram, Bobby Deol steps into another antagonist avatar. Unfortunately, his character is an absolute caricature of all the previous spy Universe films! An Army Officer betraying the country! At times he is speaking Haryanvi, the other times he is speaking something else, and you won’t get his accent throughout! Anil Kapoor brings a brief sense of maturity to the screen, while Hrithik Roshan’s mandatory crossover cameo as Major Kabir feels completely forced – a desperate attempt to remind the audience that yes, this disaster belongs to the same universe.
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Alpha Movie Review: Direction, Music
Directed by Shiv Rawail, this spy thriller possesses an unexplainable, utterly bizarre script that lacks even an iota of narrative logic. Written by Soumil Shukla and Shridhar Raghavan, with a story credited to Uday Chopra, the idea did not know where to go. Is it a father-daughter story? Is it a friend-turned-foe story? Is it a thriller? Is it a family drama? I cannot tell. It is all over the place!
Rawail won hearts with his previous work, The Railway Men, but here he seems completely out of the scene. He picks endless stylized action scenes combined together over a tight, well-written screenplay! And that also includes Hrithik Roshan not dodging bullets but catching them with his bare hands. It could have made sense in a supernatural fantasy, but why use that shot here? And still, Hrithik Roshan’s entry is the only sane part of this film.
On paper, the idea must have sounded cool – A father and his two daughters uniting to fight a man who is a threat to the nation, but well, the idea turned out to be an absolute circus and the most bizarre film I might have seen this year!
Whatever is happening on screen at any given moment feels completely detached from reality. Agents go rogue for no logical reason, top-secret intelligence agencies function with the security level of a local store, and characters talk about trauma just to deliver a punchline because the story is emotionally blank!
Alpha Movie Review: The Last Word
Alpha is absurd and chaotic. It takes a monumental franchise milestone – the first female-led soy film and turns it into some kind of spoof! vehicle—and turns it into a parody of itself. If this is the creative direction the makers are taking, it might just be time to let the Spy Universe rest in peace. Skip this one totally!
Even the technical departments in Alpha feel incredibly messy. The opening sequence feels heavily designed by VFX, with Alia Bhatt running in slow-mo shots. The only thing that works apart from Hrithik Roshan is the background score of the film, which for sure vouches that this is an action thriller!
PS. And yes, there is a brief, bizarre shot of backless Alia Bhatt bathing, and then the frame turns to a totally different scene. I am still trying to make sense of whether I imagined it or it was there by a glitch, because honestly, it made no sense!
PPS. The major reveal of Alpha is uncalled for! Moreover, it is classic Uno Reverse on Dhurandhar that is bizarre! Oh, so wish could talk about it! But some other day!
1.5 star.
Alpha Trailer
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