Hindi film history dictates that a family losing a child at the Kumbh Mela must reunite decades later for a greater cause. We’ve seen Amar Akbar Anthony wave the flag of communal harmony, and among countless others, I remember Sone Pe Suhaaga, where Nutan mistakenly flings a healthy child from a moving train while keeping the dead identical twin. It was an error on her part, but for the audience, the high came when the child grew up into Anil Kapoor. Shiv Rawail’s Alpha, the latest instalment in the YRF Spy Universe, borrows this classic template to cook up the most purposeless action film of the year.
Alpha‘s lost child is R&W Chief Vikrant Kaul’s (Anil Kapoor) daughter, Sita. Raised by her rogue foster father, Fateh Singh Lakhawat (Bobby Deol), she spends her childhood in barren confinement, bred like a lab rat as her blood is repeatedly harvested to test the assimilation of a super-soldier serum called Alpha. It is the kind of upbringing that should leave anyone with psychological scars. Instead, Sita grows into Alia Bhatt, a fighter par excellence who goes against the same man who trained her.
Enter Durga (Sharvari), Kaul’s Spain-bound daughter, who dances like a dream and is the closest the film gets to a real person rather than an idea. In no time, she reunites with Sita, setting in motion a volley of secrets. But the narrative quickly hits a dead end. The screenplay never convinces us that this revenge mission has a workable design, what geopolitical effect an Alpha super-soldier would actually have on the nation, or if there is any actual depth beneath its polished exterior.
Setting aside the lost-and-found cliché, Alpha has enough meat to be entertaining. The YRF spy template has thoroughly entertained us before with the Tiger films, War and Pathaan. None of them had believable plots, but they had swagger. A slow-motion run carried weight. A single action stance could define a hero. A mere gaze could make a villain menacing. They embraced the formula but, to a large extent, never bored.
The problem with Alpha is that it’s made to tick the box of a female-led action film. The makers name the leads Sita and Durga, hand them Ramayana-tinged dialogues that invite eye-rolls, dress them up with every conceivable action-movie accessory and strike every heroic pose, only to have them constantly look towards the men, Fateh and Kaul, before taking meaningful action. Agility and gender neutrality are welcome. They shouldn’t come at the cost of agency. If feminism is reduced to handing a woman a weapon, a crude one-liner, and the sardonic stare traditionally reserved for male action heroes, that’s mimicry, not equality.
The film doesn’t stop there. It objectifies the very same fighter women whenever it gets a chance. Two of the three songs resemble badly made fashion retailer and activewear commercials. The post-credit number is even stranger, with baffling lyrics whose presence can only be explained using the same logic that inserted ‘Lazy Lamhe’ into a Hindi-language children’s film.
The word on the street is that Alpha suffers because Dhurandhar raised the bar. No. Rawail’s film falters on its own (lack of) merits and, more importantly, because it never justifies its creative purpose. Dhurandhar impressed through painstaking world-building. Lyari looked like Lyari. A juice shop looked like a juice shop. Even a street fight felt rooted in its surroundings. Alpha, meanwhile, oscillates between overtly studio-built sets and unnecessary VFX spectacle, complete with heroines scaling steep rocks for no discernible reason.
The most sudden and unintentionally funny development in the plot is patriotism. It arrives so abruptly that it never feels like an emotional turnaround, but rather a mandatory franchise requirement. Sita isn’t someone raised on stories of national service or shaped by loyalty to the state. Her emotional universe has been defined almost entirely by captivity and manipulation. To suddenly position nationalism as her defining motivation feels dramatically unearned.
Surprisingly, the weakest department in an action film is its action choreography. None of the fights delivers an adrenaline rush. The leads are more interested in perfecting their hero walks while body doubles bear the brunt of the demanding stunt work. Constantly cutting between practical action and make-believe VFX, the film often exposes rather than hides its construction.
Alia Bhatt works hard, and the effort is glaringly visible. Her diction constantly sounds as if she is trying to emulate Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘Angry Young Man’ rather than creating her own, and it results in the weakest performance of her career. Sharvari has flashes of promise but hardly gets a seat in the narrative. Bobby Deol receives the screenplay’s only character with the potential for psychological complexity. Unfortunately, the writing reduces Fateh to another generic franchise villain, while an inexplicable hybrid accent further distances him from whatever humanity the role might have possessed.
As for Anil Kapoor, he drifts through the film with surprising detachment, as though even Vikrant Kaul has realised he has little left to contribute to the narrative. At least Subedaar allowed us the pleasure of watching him thrash an arrogant bully. Here, he’d rather dispatch his daughters to a ‘safe house’.
It isn’t as if the people behind Alpha lack the ability to make a good film. Shiv Rawail directed the assured The Railway Men. The cast is packed with capable performers. The early entries in the YRF Spy Universe succeeded because each hero carried a distinct identity and an essential swagger. Alpha mistakes iconography for identity. It gives Sita the poses of a hero without first giving her the inner life of one. This is precisely why Alpha disappoints. It doesn’t feel like a film that originated from a writer’s conviction. It feels reverse-engineered from a market brief. The industry decided it needed a female-led spy spectacle, and the screenplay merely followed instructions.
The result is a film whose feminism is tokenistic, whose patriotism is laboured, and whose character motivations are haphazard. All that’s left is an immensely talented ensemble trying to make sense of bare-minimum writing in an era obsessed with ‘peak detailing’.
VERDICT: ★ 1/2
To read more reviews of Alpha, head to the Film Critics Guild.
