The latest entry in the sprawling YRF Spy Universe—named for producers Yash Raj Films—the Hindi action movie Alpha places actress Alia Bhatt where the series’ male superstars usually stand. Where the Tiger trilogy has Salman Khan’s brooding, the War films have Hrithik Roshan’s fluid charisma, and Pathaan has Shah Rukh Khan’s blazing charm, Bhatt brings her signature, spunky attitude to the star-driven saga, only she feels completely out of place, given the story at hand.
A tale of super soldiers, government conspiracies and long-lost family members, Alpha plays out in ways that ought to be unsurprising to anyone remotely familiar with Bollywood, especially in the era of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose rightward pull on Indian politics makes each twist and turn predictable. Any movie that opens with Indian soldiers mournfully watching over the Tricolor draped over rows of coffins in the shadow of the Kargil War—the country’s 1999 territorial conflict with Pakistan—will be unafraid to make a play for nationalistic heartstrings as it goes on. This is the Bollywood of Dhurandhar after all, the grimy action duology that broke the box office by combining a tale of grisly espionage with Islamophobic propaganda. Alpha isn’t nearly as ugly, but it’s cut from the same cloth, and commits an equally dire cinematic sin: its pursuit of jingoistic sentiment is a tremendous bore.
Through numerous scenes accompanied by their own onscreen timeline (Six months later! Two weeks later! Three weeks later! And so on), the movie’s extended prologue introduces us to the ruthless Fateh Singh Lakhawa (Bobby Deol) and his level-headed cohort Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor), a pair of Indian colonels at the turn of the century, who become involved with a hush-hush scientific project to create enhanced soldiers for their country. Vikrant, who also appeared in War 2, has more of a conscience than Fateh, but in his desperation, steals the project’s secret serum to use on his ailing, pregnant wife Janaki (Dia Mirza). Several complicated happenstances lead not only to Janaki dying in childbirth, but Fateh making off with Vikrant’s newborn daughter Sita—who Vikrant believes is dead as well—before he raises her in captivity for several decades, in the hopes of molding her into the perfect covert killer.
Bobby Deol as Baba in “Alpha.”
YRF/Yash Raj Films
Played by Bhatt as an adult, Sita eventually turns on her adoptive father Fateh, for reasons one can easily intuit, but which end up explained and re-explained via both extraneous dialogue and lengthy flashbacks—the movie’s default M.O. for all information. Before long, Sita learns the truth of her upbringing (thanks in part to Fateh monologuing every thought that enters his head), which in turns yields a plot where she teams up to kill the villain alongside the world’s only other enhanced super-soldier, the Europe-raised Durga (Sharvari), who’s introduced in a dance number as a combination boxer-skater-parkour-influencer, but is also trained by Vikrant offscreen.
Fateh’s initial arrival, wherein he insists that blood be spilled for his country, threatens to rebuke the rancid jingoism that’s long infected Hindi cinema. But Alpha is quite quick to pull the curtain back on this idea if it means revealing something secretly sinister, and tied to the ever-reliable boogeyman specter of Pakistan. In keeping with this predictable eventuality, Sita—who, like Durga, is named for a key figure in Hindusim—is turned into a stand-in for patriotic duty, with her butt-kicking reprisals being framed as a justified necessity for national security. The issue with this dynamic, however, is that it comes at the cost of Sita being a character first.
A musical number from “Alpha.”
YRF/Yash Raj Films
That Sita is raised in isolation, and practically tortured daily, ought to make her a much more furious and volatile presence. However, Bhatt’s quippy approach hints at someone who’s been quite normally socialized, rather than someone broken and re-made in the visage of violence itself. She’s too well adjusted for someone with her particular, tragic backstory, and that she comes to care about India as an entity is her only defining trait, though director Shiv Rawail certainly tries to create a sisterhood between her and a perpetually checked-out Sharvari. As both women traverse the landscape of Kashmir—the film often feels like a tourism ad for the disputed territory, which is its own can of worms—they dip in and out of malformed banter while being shot like underwear models and changing outfits approximately sixty thousand times. Sure, that they can handle guns and knives is “empowering” in isolation, but the nature of the images at large tells a different story.
It also doesn’t help that the action never feels like an extension of its characters. The film may be neatly composed, but it’s too polished in its choreography, and assembled in a manner that lacks all physical and emotional impact. After the umpteenth instance of Sita and Durga dispensing with masked goons with complete efficiency (on one occasion, with the help of a cameoing hero from a different series), the fireworks become flattened into white noise. Alpha may boast a million shootings and stabbings with women in the spotlight—a relatively rarity for Hindi cinema—but each one plays out more robotically than the last, and ends up in service of the idea that when it comes to lazy gestures at nationalistic sentiment, gender is no hurdle. It’s girlboss-ing by way of chauvinistic propaganda that doesn’t even have the decency to be exciting.
Alia Bhatt in action as Sita in “Alpha.”
YRF/Yash Raj Films