Film: Phantom
Director: Kabir Khan
Actors: Saif Ali Khan, Katrina Kaif
Reading the source material for Kabir Khan’s films would be a fascinating exercise. They get me thinking about the different possibilities, and what could have come of them, had the director stuck to making exactly what he wanted. Take Phantom (based on the book Mumbai Avengers , by Hussain Zaidi) for instance.
The film gives birth to an Indian Jason Bourne, who gets sent on a secret mission to settle scores with the people behind the 26/11 attacks. The film lives out the fantasy of most Indians in the wake of all the helplessness felt during those few weeks in November.
While watching Phantom, I kept thinking of how exciting it would have been had the source material been made into a video game.
In the film, the successful completion of every mission, so to speak, leads the protagonist to a new country (he starts in the U.K., goes to the U.S., and from there to Beirut, Syria and Pakistan). Every bad guy he encounters leads to a bigger, meaner villain, culminating in a confrontation with the biggest boss of them all.
There’s even a bonus level after everything is done when our ‘Player 1’ — Daniyal Khan (Saif Ali Khan, playing a disgraced Indian Army Officer) — has to be extracted from a hostile country. But the movie, unfortunately, is a watered-down version of the idea.
It’s as though the game were being played in ‘easy’ mode by actors who’re only marginally better in emoting than CGI versions.
You get a hot sidekick in Nawaz (an odd name for Katrina Kaif), who’s expected to help Daniyal along the way. There are scenes between the two exchanging their life stories that make for the film’s funniest moments. Daniyal’s flashback, about how he came to be a disgrace to the Indian Army, comes across as the clumsiest thing an army guy could do. For her part, Nawaz explains why she has such an emotional bond with Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Hotel, when she reminisces a lost childhood.
The film, without these overtly sentimental digressions, would have at least been a harmless fun thriller, mainly because of how intriguing it is to see that the film has based its bad guys on real terrorists like David Headley, Lakhvi, Sajid Mir and Hafiz Saeed.
But based on how the film actually is, it’s safe to say that the idea of an Indian Jason Bourne continues to be a phantom.
Vishal Menon
