Batla House: House of honour (Reviews)

Batla House: House of honour (Reviews)

Delhi police could not have got a better PR job if they had actually commissioned it. However, in the best stranger-than-fiction mode, this is based on true events.

Those who keep track of the news and have a memory for current happenings, Nikkhil Advani’s Batla House is a fictionalised version the encounter of 2008, in which a cop and two suspected terrorists were killed in a shootout in a Delhi apartment building.

Muslim groups, sensation-seeking media, opportunistic leaders and human rights organisations accuse the special cell of killing innocent students to cover up their own failure in preventing bomb blasts in the city. Caught in the mess not of his making, is ACP Sanjay Kumar (John Abraham), the laconic cop, who faces a crumbling marriage to a TV reporter (Mrunal Thakur), as well as post-traumatic stress disorder; the PTSD is caused by taking a bullet in the chest, and being saved by the vest.

Neither his superiors nor the politicians facing flak by noisily protesting minority mobs stop to ask how supposedly innocent kids acquired sophisticated weapons; perhaps because the script (Ritesh Shah) wants to stack the obstacles Sanjay has to overcome.

Part of the film is a thriller, with shootouts, chases over rooftops and some cloak and dagger spying to trap a terrorist — which is fast-paced and engrossing.

Then, it converts to a court room drama in which Sanjay — wife firmly back by his side — has to defend himself against a sneering prosecutor (Rajesh Sharma in a ridiculous wig). The minutes tick slowly till Sanjay gets to deliver his rousing monologue.

Lest there be some criticism of whitewashing the notoriously brutal methods of the police in North India, Sanjay admits (not in court, obviously) that cops do stage fake encounters at times, but none in which a cop (Ravi Kishan) is killed and another wounded.

John Abraham has wisely begun to choose roles and back films that play to his strengths — a solid physique and a face that can be granite-like — he barely cracks a smile in the film, but makes for a convincingly angry and beleagured cop. None of the other actors have much to do except prop him up, so that he can shoulder the burden of carrying a film which retains some level of complexity, despite simplifying the politics (and adding an item number) to appeal to a mainstream audience that prefers everything to be black and white, when many shades of grey exist.

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