Raja Krishna Menon’s film is loosely based on the true story of how Indians were evacuated from Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion in 1990. When the going is good, the film is very good, but it is intermittently confusing, as though two directors made it: the first one understood that this subject required realistic treatment slightly removed from the conventional Bollywood film; the second entered the picture after it was completed and spoilt the tone in places by adding loud songs, needlessly heightened the pitch of the romance between the hero and his wife, and ended with a splash of stretched-out, flag-waving patriotism.
These add-ons qualitatively diminish an otherwise well-handled film that is unusual on the Bollywood firmament, the sort rarely headlined by a star of Akshay Kumar’s stature in this industry. Our hypothetical Director 2 should have respected the audience’s intellect a little more.
Airlift draws on an episode in our history that most other countries would have tomtommed from the rooftops if it had been their success story. Not so in India where filmmakers dread touching recent history because of the national penchant for bans and violence towards creative works we disagree with. According to a 2014 report on Scroll, after Saddam Hussein’s forces overran Kuwait in August 1990, the Indian government evacuated more than 110, 000 citizens from Iraq and Kuwait via an airlift that included nearly 500 flights. The operation is the largest civilian evacuation in history… Eventually, Air India would fly 488 flights over 59 days, carrying 111, 711 passengers”. The film puts it at 1.7 lakh Indians in a joint operation between Air India, Indian Airlines and the Indian Air Force in coordination with – and this is the film’s big flaw – a single fictional Indian bureaucrat and a single fictional Kuwait-based Indian.