PremiumSky Force Review: A dash of clichés, screaming B Praak and a partly redeeming second half Ft. Akshay Kumar and Veer Pahariya
Sky Force Review: The challenge now is to make a patriotic movie without B Praak because Sky Force force feeds him and a lot more formula but it gets exciting when it moves away from all of it.
Last Updated: 10.25 PM, Jan 23, 2025
Sky Force Story: Captain Ahuja (Akshay Kumar) is the group leader of The Tiger, a battalion of the Indian Air Force known for their success rate and bravery. TK Vijaya aka Tabby (Veer Pahariya) is a brave young soldier who believes in saving the day rather than following protocol. When the Pakistan Air Force strikes and leaves many Indian cadets dead and injured, The Tigers decide to retaliate and give the neighboring country a very strong response. The mission is complete, but Tabby disappears and is announced missing in operation for a decade before Ahuja finds one clue and reopens the investigation.
Sky Force Review:
Raise your hand if B Praak screaming to the top of his voice with lyrics that have words like Mitti, Maa, Tiranga, Pyaar, and Shaheed sprinkled all over is the only way you recognize a patriotic movie now. Well, both my hands are raised, and I want the makers to plead guilty for making the singer a cliché with the troop that they feel is the only way their movie will work. Akshay Kumar has some two or three B Praak patriotic songs to his credit. So when a cliché is made, continues, and joins the group of clichés to become a formula, what you get is the first half of a film called Sky Force. But when the makers decide to abandon those very clichés and go beyond the obvious is when you find redemption, and that is the second half of the same film called Sky Force.
Directed by Abhishek Anil Kapur (Sarfira, Bhediya, Stree 2) an d Sandeep Kewlani (who also wrote Runway 34), Sky Force is written by Sandeep with additional dialogues from Niren Bhatt (Bala, Stree 2, Bhediya) and Aamil Keeya Khan (Drishyam 2, Shaitaan). So everyone, even if a starter’s resume, comes from some very successful projects and has worked with big names. They now come together to make Sky Force and are the helmers of the ship with no backing from a massive name behind the scenes. Add to it, there is a massive responsibility to honor a story that has happened for real where an Air Force pilot and Mahavir Chakra recipient, Squadron Leader Ajamada B. Devayya, was involved.
While it is an earnest attempt at telling the story without falling into the clutches of jingoism (for the most part, if not all) and keeping the screenplay crisp, the biggest mistake this film makes is emphasizing the fact that major creative liberties have been taken and it is ‘loosely’ inspired by the life of a celebrated martyr—only to then end with pictures comparing how the casting of the movie was made keeping in mind the real-life people, almost making it look like a biopic. What is the audience supposed to make of this? Sky Force is made with the intention to be ‘safe’ for lack of a better word because it never goes subtle enough to be The Forgotten Army and is not chest-thumping-on-steroids loud enough to be URI: The Surgical Strike.
It is a movie that begins with the intention to acknowledge every possible cliché and formula of a patriotic film genre and brings the main conflict in the second half. For a movie about Veer Pahariya’s Tabby, the screenplay for most of its first half is worshiping Akshay Kumar. Of course, he is a massive star for actors with a fresh resume. But to make your selling-point character the pillion rider to announce him as the hero in the end is not a digestible structure. And this comes out even more when the movie in the second half shifts to the main conflict of finding Tabby after it has touched upon every cliché and a B Praak song. Someone give my man B Praak some hot water, please.
And the post-interval block is where the movie finds a soul somewhere that is not borrowed or a reminder of some other movie. Because now it is finding its hero. The action is impressive, but the CGI is visible, and that is somewhere a ‘pull-you-out-of-the-magic’ moment between a good scene. Not that real-looking CGI has never happened in the world. Sky Force hits much more when you realize this is a real-life story and not fiction. The system has forgotten a man who fought for it because he chose to not obey the protocol and save 8 lives. There is so much gravitas in that situation, but the Kumar starrer chooses to make that struggle into a montage and a 2-minute monologue. Maybe the quest to find his story and earn respect for him would have been the better chunk if invested more time in.
We have seen aerial combats a lot; a movie about the bureaucracy behind it might have been a better idea. Acting-wise, Veer Pahariya has a lot to learn, but he does put a lot of effort in. Sara Ali Khan is probably following the same method in different looks, and it’s high time she revamps her style. Akshay Kumar, for the entire first half, delivers dialogues like he is reading them out of somewhere, and this is not something you expect from an actor of his stature, especially when tabloids talk of his hundred-crore fees for his films. The art department does a decent job; the music has almost no recall value.
Sky Force Verdict:
The intent is indeed to make a good film, and Sky Force in the second half gives glimpses of how it could have been a much better film if not made with a formula in mind.
Sky Force hits the big screen on January 24, 2025. Stay tuned to OTTplay for more information on this and everything else from the world of streaming and films.