Looking at the general opinion of this, which is, at best, middling, if not openly hostile, I’m for some reason reminded of the track KP Snacks, by obscure Scottish comedy rap act Bin Men. The one that’s not Romeo Taylor waxes lyrical about how the UK’s best mass producer of crisps and chocolate dip is “the realest fucking business out there” and concludes: “if you disagree… you’re a fucking idiot.”
I obviously cannot bring across in text how perfectly his tone and phrasing reflects how I feel when people are being fucking idiots, so you might want to listen to 00:18 to 00:21 to understand how I stand in vicious judgment of people trying to dunk on War 2.
Because what the fuck do you people want?
Look, there’s plenty of reasons you might not like War 2, but they’re all the sort of thing where you shouldn’t be going to the cinema in the first place. You don’t like action films. You’re uncomfortable with your sexuality. You hate fun. But if you’re showing up at the cinema for the fucking sequel to a ridiculous, over-the-top bromantic actioner and you walk out of this without a smile on your face… I mean what is actually fucking wrong with you?
And listen, I know what I’m talking about. I sat through Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, which is but three minutes shorter than this, as obsessed with making you believe its hero(es) are godlike via complicated set-pieces, and completely fucking boring.
By comparison, in War 2 everything is at a fever pitch. The movie seems to even rush through its establishing shots to make sure that it never, ever stops being entertaining. The classic post-intermission flashback? You’re in, you’re out, lets you know everything you need to know. The comedy sidekick? Which one? There isn’t one, we don’t need them, NTR Jr’s got the jokes and (for some reason) acronyms for you.
I mean War 2 opens with Hrithik Roshan being so awesome that he tames a wolf just by looking at it, before he fights a bunch of ninjas and a helicopter—a sequence that would be the climax of basically any other film. Sounds too generic? While War 2, like its predecessor, wears its inspirations on its sleeve, it again proves that no country on earth is making action films like India, always providing a twist that I’ve never seen before. NTR Jr—who Western audiences will most likely have last seen in RRR—appears in a rescue sequence where he does something so funny and so clever with a wrecking ball that I legitimately refuse to spoil it. And a sequence involving a plane-jacking is genuinely unique.
So War 2 goes hard. And I mean… hard. Fellas, is it gay to have a male friend? War 2 says: yes. And it’s fucking awesome. If War was a one-sided love story—poor wooden Tiger Shroff’s doomed adoration of Roshan—War 2 gives us star-crossed, uh, “good friends” in a situationship where boundaries are not respected, and everything is driven to the kind of heights that haven’t been seen since Vernon Wells’ Bennett screamed “we don’t need the girl, John” at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s John Matrix in Commando.
If you remember the conclusion to that film—where Schwarzenegger literally “lays pipe” in his opponent—things go exactly as allegorical here, as our heroes take turns penetrating each other. You know, with weapons and that.
There is a sequence in this movie featuring the female lead Kiara Advani, that is so aggressively sexual that I have to assume that censors required it because they feared the lights would come up after the film and it would look like the cinema was a bathhouse.
*ahem*
Wait, what was my point? My point is that War 2 is completely guileless in its attempt to push everything, literally everything, as far as it will go. It’s ridiculous, it’s not even asking you to take it seriously, it’s just trying to entertain you. Sure, maybe it goes a bit too far. Maybe it’s got some blindspots. But ultimately?
War 2 is the realest fucking movie out there. And if you disagree? You’re a fucking idiot.
Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.