Far from a tribute...rather, an injustice... Review on LOC - Kargil

LOC is a below average movie and with all the hype surrounding it, a complete disappointment. The brave soldiers who laid their lives for the country and for whom this movie was supposed to be a tribute are reduced to absolute caricatures by J. P. Dutta with sufficient help from his overbloated, incompetent cast. Including inept actors like Karan Nath, Himanshu Malik, Puru Raj Kumar (letting him depict a soldier after what he did in 1993 is a sin on Mr. Dutta's part), Amar Upadhyay, Bikram Saluja etc. is certainly not my idea of trying to make a great movie. There is not a single moment in this movie which makes you feel really proud of our soldiers. All Mr. Dutta really achieves is giving every member of his humongous cast some footage and in the process completely destroys the excellent subject matter he had at his disposal.

Yes, it is true that every character portrayed in the movie played an important part in India's victory in the war, but showing one character die every 5 minutes with the same “Oh mom, oh, mom'', ''Oh wife. oh wife'', ''Oh girlfriend oh girlfriend'' dialogues is ridiculous. And what is even more ridiculous is that every time one of the ''heroes'' is shot, even though five men have already rushed to his aid and have seen the wound, he still has to give them the mandatory explanation - ''I have been shot''. Also, every time an offer is made to carry a wounded ''hero'' down to the base camp, each one of them comes up with the same dialogue – ''No, that would waste 6-8 men, we can't afford that''. Yes, I agree that this is what might have happened in real life, but in a movie, these dialogues being repeated 10-15 times just bore the hell out of you and make the sacrifices of the characters seem so trivial. The introduction of every new character will be given through another officer commenting ''Oh my god, aap itne bahadur ho, aapko dar nahin lagta?''...it is as if

every soldier other than the main characters is a cowardly idiot. Introduction of the wives, girlfriends, mothers etc. etc. is overly long, completely cliched and very boring. Tell me this - why do the wives and girlfriends have to be in stereotypically precise makeup all the time? Also, when the soldiers are talking to them, it is as if

they are in a Karan Johar movie, and not in Kargil.

There is not even a hint of any effort having been put into the narrative. It is completely disjointed and incoherent. In spite of the powerful material, the script is loose and amateurish. Whenever interest and emotion are just about to be generated, discontinuity brings you back to square one. The level of idiocy is so high that the director actually devotes 30-45 minutes in the second half (yes, the second, not the first) to remind us of all the wives, girlfriends etc. The action is so repetitive it becomes boring and tiresome by the time the main action in the climax happens. The dialogues are crap. The effort to give every hero their share of the usual anti-Pakistan and ''I'm brave...yes, I'm brave...oh I'm so brave'' dialogues results in nothing but ludicrousness. Oh, and yes, there are also the typically stupid national-integration dialogues here and there. And whatever is left for the dialogues is made up by the grotesque and imbecilic slew of obscenities (which is probably Mr. Dutta's idea of bold realism) and regiment slogans every other second. The speeches given by the commanding officers before each major battle are wishy-washy and generate no emotion whatsoever (compare this to Sunny Deol's speech before the main battle in Border which brought everyone to their feet, cheering and clapping). The Pakistani soldiers are shown to be a bunch of complete retards throughout the movie (as usual) and yet, at the end, Akshaye Khanna manages to put in one line on how bravely they fought...inanity reigns supreme.

If all this was not enough, here are some glaring glitches. Night turns into day and back into night from one scene to another. Bayonets bend when thrust into bodies, thereby informing the viewers that they are made of rubber. And even when they do not bend, so many of them are thrust without drawing even a dop of blood. Saif Ali Khan is called Capt. Nayar instead of Capt. Nayyar at quite a few places (where is that extensive research that we have been hearing about for the past 6 months, Mr. Dutta?). And the same Saif blinks after he has dies.

Is there anything good in the movie? Yes...the duo of Ashutosh Rana and Manoj Bajpai. Perfect casting...their camaraderie is the only truly entertaining part of the movie. Ajay Devgan, Abhishek Bachchan, Akshaye Khanna and Saif Ali Khan are ok too. Also, J. P. Dutta has managed to get his hands on some very good resources. He is able to include actual shots of IAF helicopters and the Bofors guns which give some amount (however small it may be) of credibility to the movie (but the excessive mention of how good the Bofors gun is does get on your nerves). And most of the cinematography is good.

Final word: LOC is four hours of excessive boredom, a shoddy piece of cinema, an insipid, sluggish and very very mediocre movie that instead of being a tribute to

our soldiers, ends up as a grave injustice to them.

Avoid this one. Watch Border (even if for the nth time) instead.