A year ago, almost to the day, when Fighter released and didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, director Siddharth Anand put forth a bizarre claim. He said that the Hrithik Roshan-Deepika Padukone starrer, described by its makers as “India’s first aerial action film”, had not found much favour with the audience because “90 per cent of Indians haven’t flown in planes”. By that logic, one would have to be an Italian mafioso to appreciate The Godfather.
The good thing is that you don’t have to sign up for a fighter pilot licence before you walk in for a show of Sky Force. This bi-annual Akshay Kumar deshbhakti dose — ‘a fictional story inspired by real events’ — has the kind of thrill and drama that every viewer, brought up on a steady diet of Bollywood patriotic films, is familiar with. Which is both a good and a bad thing.
First, the good. Sky Force is a well-made film. At 125 minutes, it is crisp. It won’t make you look at your phone for the next Urvashi Rautela meme. And it has Akshay Kumar, in form and in his element, after a long time.
The bad? The film is too formulaic. The scene, setting, dialogue, drama all give a distinct feeling of deja vu. In a bid to cater to a growing ‘cinematic idiom’ where patriotism has been reduced to froth-at-the-mouth jingoism, it attempts to lather what happened more than 50 years ago with sentiments that run high in 2025. We now really need to ask for a cap on the number of times a patriotic Bollywood film (starring Akshay or not) can say: “Yeh naya India hain. Hum ghar mein ghus ke maarte hain.’
Well, at least ‘the josh is high’ in Sky Force. Set many decades before Uri and focusing predominantly on the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, Sky Force starts off in 1971, during yet another India-Pakistan faceoff, the one which gave birth to Bangladesh. A captured Pakistani soldier (played by a solid Sharad Kelkar) recounts his role in the ’65 war to Group Captain Kumar Om Ahuja (Akshay), who is keen to know the whereabouts of a team member of his Tiger Squadrons battalion who had been reported missing in action in the previous war.
This is no spoiler because the trailer of Sky Force does reveal that the man gone missing is fighter pilot T.K. Vijaya aka Tabby (debutant Veer Pahariya). Tabby, who wears his heart a little too much on his sleeve and is rebellious to a fault, is known to break protocol and often bend the rules — “jung mein boundaries nahin hain toh training mein kyon?” — Tabby believes. But Ahuja is willing to forgive all because Tabby is good at his job and reminds him of his deceased brother.
The first half of Sky Force — as is the default of almost every film based on fighter pilots — is Top Gun redux. Except that Tom Cruise, despite all the stunts he has done his entire life, wouldn’t really be caught dead parkour-ing off a chandelier (we sure hope not!) in a song, like Akshay does.
The song ’n’ dance grinds to a halt, quite literally, when the soldiers have to swing into action. Based on India’s attack on the Sargodha airbase of Pakistan in 1965, which marked our first airstrike, Sky Force has quite a few aerial action scenes. They are visceral for the most part but the patchy VFX work does show up sometimes. At least two sky-to-soil combat sequences are well done and provide quite an adrenaline rush.
In Half Two, Sky Force — directed by Abhishek Anil Kapur and Sandeep Kewlani — metamorphoses from a war film to an investigative drama, with Ahuja desperately trying to look for Tabby, against all odds, which includes fighting a non-cooperative establishment and seniors who have washed their hands off a missing soldier who is quickly and conveniently labelled a “madman”.
The opening slate of Sky Force says that it is dedicated to “jinhone pyaar kiya aur desh ke liye balidaan diya”. The character of T.K. Vijaya is based on Maha Vir Chakra awardee A.B. Devayya, and though the film follows a tried-and-tested real-to-reel template, it doesn’t manipulate the audience. You feel the pain and the tears well up organically, with no character guilty of overdoing their parts. Except a miscast Sara Ali Khan who hams it up as Tabby’s wife. Nimrat Kaur has it even worse. Playing Ahuja’s wife, her character is reduced to being a mannequin for ’60s and ’70s fashion. Manish Choudhary and Calcutta boy Soham Majumdar do well in their brief but significant roles.
Newcomer Veer Pahariya may have come off as inadequate in the trailer and songs, but does have screen presence and decent acting chops. We wouldn’t mind seeing more of him.
Which brings us to Akshay. The man, three years short of 60, looks sharp in uniform and plays his part with both charm and confidence. He also aces lines which require a certain aura and authority. Like: “It is not about the machine, it is about the man” or “Doosra gaal aagey politician karte hain, sipahi nahin”. But the actor-star is unable to shake off the saviour complex which has come to define almost every role he now plays. If there are Indians in the line of fire in a war zone, workers stuck in a mine, a space mission gone wrong, a hockey team to be coached to gold, a toilet to be built, a sanitary napkin to be invented or a low-cost airline to be rolled out, expect Mr Khiladi to be there. Front and centre.
