Major Review: A ‘Major’ Cinematic Achievement!

A  ‘Major’ Cinematic Achievement

Major(in Hindi)

By Subhash K Jha

Major

Starring  Adivi Sesh, Prakash Raj,Revathy, Sobhita Dhulipala, Saiee Manjrekar, Revathi, Murali Sharma and Anish Kuruvilla

Directed by Shashi Kiran Tikka

Rating:****

Major, if you will allow some silly wordplay, is a  major achievement. It embraces the language  of  mainstream cinema without  playing low-level gimmicky tricks. It wants to  tell the true-life  story  of a  trueblue  hero . But it wants to do it in the language  of the commercial Hindi cinema, and it succeeds unanimously in  giving us  another memorable war-hero epic after  Shershaah.

This is  the  story  of  Major Sandeep Unnikishnan  who perished while trying to save lives in  the  26/11 attack on the Taj.

A remarkably accomplished sound design  and  Vamsi Patchipulusu’s unadorned  but  deeply empathic cinematography  gives to the  narrative the mood and texture of lived-in immediacy as viewed through luminous lenses.

The  film starts with  Major Sandeep declaring he  can  handle the terror crisis on his own, and then moves back to happier times when as child (a bright-eyed child actor who looks nothing  like Adivi Sesh) and his typically  warm and upright Telugu parents played by well by Revathy and  Prakash Raj especially  the  former. Prakash  lapses into broad hamming at  the climax comparing his  martyred son to Mahatma Gandhi and Patel.

Such extra-energetic panegyrics could well have been avoided. The narrative has enough intrinsic steam to sustain the  biographical brio  from beginning to  the tragic end. Adivi Sesh nails the  character with his outstanding  body language .The sheer  joy he experiences in playing such a heroic  character shines through in nearly  every frame. In the action scenes, he is every inch the  committed never-say-die commando. Miraculously he carries off the earlier portions  as a schoolboy romancing the pretty but over-madeup  Saiee Manjrekar, with aplomb.

There are some interesting supporting performances. Sobhita Dhulipala as a high-maintenance journalist who saves a  foreigner’s  child from terrorists, brings in the fictional element in a true-life  story that  stoutly refuses  to be  a dry documentary-like  tale of a true-life  war hero who  left us  while  fighting the enemy.

All we get from war heroism is an occasional memorable war epic such as this.Major is  well worth our while.