Headlined by Vidyut Jammwal and directed by Sankalp Reddy, IB71 keeps you on the edge of your seat for most part of its 119-minute runtime. The film comes with a riveting premise and what gets in the way of this entertaining spy thriller is its poor execution.
IB71 revolves around Dev Jammwal — played by Vidyut Jammwal — an Indian intelligence officer who foils Pakistan’s plans to attack the Northeast of India during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971. Hand-in-glove with China, Pakistan is planning on sending fighter planes from West Pakistan to their military bases in East Pakistan. To do so, they must use Indian airspace. As intel about Pakistan’s schemes reaches New Delhi, Dev comes up with an ingenious plan which, if it succeeds, would allow India to close its airspace to Pakistan and botch the attack.
Dev puts together a team of 30 intel officers who will sneak into Pakistan on a covert mission. Disguised as passengers, they board a plane from Srinagar, which is ‘hijacked’ as per plan by two Kashmiri militants. But the ISI gets wind of it, and the passengers are taken to a hotel and placed under surveillance. In the form of a how-dunnit, the rest of IB71 is about how Dev manages to fulfil his mission and also get all 30 officers back into India unscathed.
As the man in charge with a bunch of people counting on him to get them out alive, Vidyut Jammwal is a revelation. Unlike his previous films, where his action skills were at the forefront, IB71 allows Vidyut to explore the actor in him. If the absence of kicks and punches hits Jammwalions hard, they can take pride in the fact that their action hero has turned a corner by adding gravitas to his role as the master brain behind a dangerous covert operation on foreign soil.
There are enough nail-biting moments in IB71 to give you an adrenaline rush. The part where the hostages are allowed to make phone calls to their families in India is one such smart sequence. As the undercover agents dial the IB headquarters to slip in information about their situation in code language, an ISI officer (Ashwath Bhatt) taps into the calls and figures out what they are up to.
And then there are the disappointments. The Kashmiri militant angle fails to make an impact. Qasim (Vishal Jethwa) and his cousin Ashfaq (Faizan Khan), the hijackers, come across as two idiots with zero scare quotient, which takes away from the seriousness of the task they have taken up. And when the IB has only 10 days in hand to foil Pakistan’s war plans, spending six days surveilling Qasim and Ashfaq seems a bit stretched.
Director Sankalp Reddy fails to recreate the breathless tension of his 2017 thriller The Ghazi Attack. The actual plot in IB71 takes off almost an hour after setting the stage and by the time you are invested in it, the film is over. The lack of major twists and the linear narrative arc also weaken the overall flow.
There is a scene in IB71 where Dev’s handler, played by Anupam Kher, asks him ‘Are Pakistanis really this dumb?’ That is a question that viewers might want to ask them too while watching IB71. For instance, Dev always manages to outmanoeuvre his opponents. The ease with which he and his team enter Pakistan, hoodwinking the Pakistani army, and return victorious makes it feel like they were vacationing in Shimla instead of spending agonising days on the line of fire.
The biggest letdown is perhaps the lacklustre climax — though shot beautifully by Gnana Shekar V.S. — where Indian agents overpower Pakistani police officers in a dark corridor. IB71 falls short of creating the high drama of, for instance, Ben Affleck’s character’s escape from Tehran in Argo (2012), or closer home, the thrill of Akshay Kumar’s character fleeing Saudi Arabia in Neeraj Pandey’s Baby (2015).
