FILMS
about genuinely unsung heroes are a fine thing, and Raja Krishna Menon's Airlift is a sincere effort to celebrate an insanely daunting task.
In 1990, during the first Gulf War, over 170,000 Indians were stranded in Kuwait when it was attacked by Iraq. A few local businessmen and Indian diplomats took on the valiant, significantly uphill task of bringing those people home.
The number itself is staggering -- necessitating nearly 500 aeroplanes full of people -- andAirlift, for the most part, delivers this action with efficiency and a relative lack of exaggerated drama.
The situation itself is patently absurd, with armoured tanks rolling onto city streets in Kuwait one loud night, and Menon does well to keep things reined in more than most Bollywood filmmakers would.
Akshay Kumar plays a profit-hungry businessman, a man who disapproves of Hindi film music and would rather listen to Arabic tunes, but the nightmare of living in a war-torn foreign city awakens his patriotic and humane side, which leads to what remains the largest civil evacuation of all-time.
The film is well shot, with cinematographer Priya Seth achieving the right mix of impressive aerial shots and cramped handheld bits, and reasonably well-textured with credible Middle Eastern detailing.
There are hiccups -- like Kumar singing a Hindi song moments after refusing to listen to Hindi songs -- and the songs do indeed get in the way every single time they come on, but things are smoothened over by the solid character artists populating this film, from the surprisingly effective Purab Kohli to the ever-excellent Kumud Mishra to the businessmen who play Kumar's buddies to the fascinatingly helpless Feryna Wazheir, who plays a Kuwaiti woman hoping to make her escape with the Indians.
It isn't all on the up and up, though: Prakash Belawadi, who seems to be in every film now post his star turn in Talvar, plays an infuriatingly pigheaded and badly written character.
Meanwhile Nimrat Kaur, who plays Kumar's wife, seems challenged by the brief of speaking softly with a strain of Punjabi, like a woman from a Pakistani play, while constantly wearing make-up regardless of how harrowed her character is, like a woman from an Indian television show.
Pawan is presumably how Khan now wants to be regarded: as an
entertainer, a devout pair of hands, and somebody to be trusted with our
children. All these qualities are to the fore when Pawan encounters
Shahida (Harshaali Malhotra), a mute six-year-old Kashmiri separated
from her mother while crossing from 
