The best Indian wartime movie

Rating: 8/10 (12 January 2019)

The list of good Indian war movies is rather short with Border, Lakshya, Madras Cafe coming to mind. However, given that the grammar of Indian war movies has always been emotion and never action, compared to the Hollywood flicks, these fall short when it comes to the action sequences. Uri is, hence, a welcome addition to this list.
The first five minutes set the tone with a heart-stopping capture of a militant attack on the Indian army. The movie proceeds in chapters with the right mix of family and field life. The scene of the last rites of an army martyr, though predictable, is really touching and leaves a lump in your throat. By intermission, the movie is set up nicely for an action-packed second half.
You are glued to the screen as the squads destroy POK launchpads in elaborate sequences never seen before in Indian cinema. The cinematography and sound is spot-on putting the viewer right in the middle of the action. There is a bit of your usual unbelievable bollywood masala with the hero killing the main handler single-handedly but this is a minor blip in what is an engaging climax.
Vicky Kaushal is brilliant as he moves effortlessly from playing an emotional son (particularly in a scene where he finds out his mother may be forgetting him) to donning the role of an operation-lead. His sister, niece, mother and brother-in-law have small roles in which they excel. However, the movies fails to develop the other key characters of the movie. Paresh Rawal is so out-of-place as Ajit Doval that every time he says something, you feel there is a comic punch line coming. Yami Gautam and Kirti Kullhari are just pretty faces and you would care less what happens to them. But Vicky's performances and the action scenes help you overlook these shortcomings of the movies.
Contrary to what was being said in the media, there is very little Modi-propoganda and hardly any Indo-Pak jingoism. Just some world-class battle sequences and an immensely watchable movie worthy of a theatre-visit.