Holiday

An army intelligence officer home on leave, in the middle of arranged-marriage meetings, stumbles on the trail of a sleeper cell in the city. His holiday ends there: he starts finding the men one by one. The film is not interested in action. It is interested in invisibility inside civilian life: it puts the sleeper cell at the centre and turns not knowing who is what in a crowd into its source of tension. The form is commercial Indian cinema: songs, family comedy and long fight sequences. It runs close to three hours. The film is a remake: the Hindi version of Thuppakki, which A. R. Murugadoss made in Tamil in 2012, directed again by him. The same director shot the same story twice, in two languages, with two different stars. Akshay Kumar leads, with Sonakshi Sinha and Freddy Daruwala in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like Bollywood action and Akshay Kumar. Who it is not for: anyone looking for nuance on the political side. The enemy is drawn in one dimension and the film never enters the argument.