Sam Bahadur offers numerous advantages
Sam Bahadur offers numerous advantages. It follows two dazzling blockbusters for director Meghna Gulzar in Talvar (2015) and Raazi (2018). Starring in it is Vicky Kaushal, who has experience portraying soldiers on a mission against the country’s enemies, having done so for both fictional and real-life characters in Sardar Udham (2021) and Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019).
Finally, it tells the story of one of the nation’s most legendary warriors, Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, a near-mythological giant who survived World War II after being shot nine times by a Japanese soldier. You sit there for the longest period, twiddling and squirming, waiting for that one perfect moment of cinematic perfection.
When director Meghna Gulzar and writer Bhavani Iyer strive to make you laugh, you smile broadly. And yet, in the end, you fail to understand Sam Bahadur’s point at all. After leaving the theater, I felt as though I had just been given a new version of the yearly online listicle you read on Manekshaw.
The man who was known for feeding the nation’s then-prime minister with humble pie, proudly sporting a bushy handlebar moustache, and dispensing bracelets and battlezone proverbs. The main reason biopics are a murky genre is that they typically have an episodic structure and are constrained by length and veracity requirements.
The location and manner in which a film’s main conflict is positioned are what distinguish memorable works in this genre. In Oppenheimer, which was released earlier this year, the story revolved around the protagonist’s security clearance being revoked. The famed protagonist’s journey is told by Sam Bahadur without a lot of narrative flourishes, divergence, or critiques of Manekshaw’s recent adoption as the epitome of the sigma male.
It delivers a hagiography because it is so unwaveringly focused on reaping the benefits of bringing his mythology to life on cinema. Indeed, there is greater nuance in the portrayal of Manekshaw’s Pakistani equivalent, Yahya Khan (Mohd Zeeshan Ayyub), albeit not before some unsettling prosthetics and ageing makeup.
Vicky Kaushal is undoubtedly the main factor that draws you in to this movie. Sam Bahadur offers Vicky Kaushal the same type of magic to work that he has demonstrated in Sardar Udham, Raazi (2018), and Masaan (2015), following a generally disappointing year in terms of characters developed for him in Govinda Naam Mera, Zara Hatke Zara Bachke, and The Great Indian Family.
Manekshaw’s walk, his vocalization, his well-known easy charm, and his quick wit would all seem like caricatures in the hands of a less skilled actor, but Vicky Kaushal, ever the self-assured man, keeps a tight hold on himself. His self-awareness and self-accepting demeanor off-screen perfectly mirror the protagonist’s positivity and steadfast confidence in himself.
Sanya Malhotra, who plays Sam’s charming wife Silloo Bode, provides the Manekshaw family with an emotional anchor while balancing his free-spirited energy with the ease that she has most recently shown in Jawan and Kathal. Throughout the movie, there are many hints that Manekshaw’s victories come at Silloo and their daughters’ expense.
However, Fatima Sana Shaikh’s portrayal of Indira Gandhi is mainly unreliable, with much of the fault attributed to the casting decision. The war song Badhte Chalo is incredibly bland and inelegant. The film’s soundtrack is loud, intrusive, and unmelodious, which is surprising given Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s evident musical talent and their previous outstanding work with Gulzar, Raazi.
Sam Bahadur employs historical video skillfully to maintain the narrative and provide a documentary feel to the proceedings, despite the film’s mediocre background score. However, even this helps to explain the film’s staccato temporal jumps and passive linearity.
Sam Bahadur comes off as charming and interesting in the discrete parts of Manekshaw’s life that come together to make the overall storyline of the movie. Thanks to cinematographer Jay I. Patel’s work on the air strikes and battle scenes in Burma, these are expertly shot, conceived, and acted, and they may just make it worthwhile to see this larger-than-life vignette reel in theaters.
However, because of the Sam Bahadur film’s generally upbeat tone, the threads that connect them—like Manekshaw’s banter with his radio set-carrying cook, the lead actor and his lady’s ballroom meet-cute, or the scene where he is seen making the wildly popular declaration about gurkhas and fear—feel jumbled and desperately need to be given some leeway.
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