KESARI REVIEW

Posted by Unknown on March 21, 2019 in News, Review,

KESARI MOVIE REVIEW 🌟

Anurag Singh's Kesari brings to the big screen the famed 1897 Battle of Saragarhi, which witnessed 21 valiant soldiers of the 36 Sikh Regiment take on a 10,000-strong army of Afghan tribesmen in the rugged terrain of what is today Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Though the audience knows how it will end, the way the filmmaker tells this tale is worth a watch.

On September 12, 1897, the Afghan soldiers attempted to capture Saragarhi, which acted as a signalling post between Fort Gulistan and Fort Lockhart, with the intention of cutting off all communication between the two forts. Despite being low on ammunition and receiving no reinforcements, the 21 soldiers of the 36th Sikh Regiment of the British Indian Army led by Havildar Ishar Singh (Akshay Kumar) put up a strong fight.

Kesari takes the audience where history textbooks did not, into the lives of the soldiers

Anurag Singh and co-writer Girish Kohli have no excuse to botch up the material, but they do so anyway. Sluggishly paced until the interval and springing to life only in fits and starts in the second half, Kesari is a poor attempt to revisit a chapter in Indian military history that earned the admiration even of British colonisers and is celebrated to this day in Punjab.

Akshay Kumar effortlessly switches from the emotional scenes to the high-intensity war sequences. Parineeti Chopra, who plays Havildar Ishar Singh's wife, has barely any scenes to speak of.

The film is well mounted and shot. It is impressive in terms of scale. The production design by Subrata Chakraborty and Amit Ray, the stunt coordination by Lawrence Woodward.

Lost in the process is the opportunity to stage a pure, high-octane war drama. The 150-minute runtime, which includes flashbacks to Isher’s courtship of the woman he eventually marries (played by Parineeti Chopra), and limp attempts at slapstick humour, slow down the momentum ever so often. A movie that should have been about a legendary last stand becomes yet another star vehicle for Akshay Kumar, who is the only character with a back story. The other soldiers, which includes characters played doesn't have much screen presence or any much contributions.

Kesari is a war film with a pleasantly pacifist soul. Just a little tempering of its overt enthusiasm might have prevented the battle scenes from becoming so exhaustingly monotonous at times. The last half hour or so of the film would have worked far better had some restraint being exercised in the staging of the two climaxes - one built around Ishar's last stand, the other around Gurmukh, the boy who turns into the man of the moment.

Kesari is a complete Akshay film. And he pulls it off, keeping that ‘Kesari’ pagdi aloft right till the end, delivering thundering speeches, and keeping his men’s morale up. His Ishar Singh is inhabited and convincing, and it helps that his Punjabi accent is completely on point.