IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack Review : Grim and Gripping

IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack Review : Grim and Gripping

What: ‘IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack’ - the thriller keeps you on your toes from tarmac to turmoil to trauma.

IC814, helmed by Anubhav Sinha, recounts the sordid history of the longest hijack incidents of India when the ill-fated Air India flight from Kathmandu to New Delhi was hijacked on 24th December 1999 and flown to Kandahar in Taliban-governed Afghanistan.

Few minutes into the show and after the take off the delayed flight, the passengers turn hostages with the armed hijackers forcing Flight Captain, Devi Sharan (Played by Vijay Varma) at gun point to fly them to Kabul, else they will pile up bodies. The hijackers had just one single aim and that was to free one of the most dangerous terrorists, Maulana Masood Azhar. Masood was jailed in India for more than four years. In no time, the show escalates to an urgent sky potboiler encompassing the harrowing plight of the passengers, the flight duty officers and air hostesses, and the chaos engulfing the Indian bureaucracy and intelligence agencies, the IB and RAW.

Anubhav Sinha is a master of atmosphere. Known for creating impeccable tension in his films by braving social issues, he creates tension in the air this time. His cinematic acumen pierces underneath your skin and even twists your insides with his unapologetic and palpable depiction of the surmounting fear and anxiety brewing inside the plane.

Passengers choking and gasping, hostesses slapped, punched and kicked, even a couple of them are stabbed and slit, the lines between the real and reel gets blurred as Sinha and co-creator Trishant Srivastava unrelentingly re-imagines the trauma and distress from the source “Fight into Fear” penned by Captain Sharan and Srinjoy Chowdhury that prevailed over seven days.

The fear and frenzy are constantly interspersed with some exquisite shots of the plane cruising through the clouds (VFX by Anirban Chakraborty) and real-life archival footages and voiceover chronicling the history of militancy and terrorism. I was particularly impressed by the meticulous editing by Pritam Kalwar and Amarjit Singh – the narrative intercuts between plethora of diplomacy conversations involving IB, RAW and NSG tactics for negotiating with the terrorists and the newsroom antics propelled by the constant fight of ethics and duty between TV and Print – Dia Mirza and Amrita Puri play the respective anchors and the female protagonists including Patralekha (playing air hostess Indrani) and Pooja Gor, playing Sharan’s wife.

Sinha assembles a mammoth starcast of veteran actors – Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Arvind Swamy, Manoj Pahwa, Kumud Mishra, Kanwaljeet, Aditya Srivastava , Sushant Singh, Yashpal Sharma – the list is almost endless, but the plot gains the heat in the last episode where the negotiation takes place – Pahwa kills it with his caustic wit and Rajiv Thakur( of Kapil Sharma Comedy Nights fame) , rendering an important performance as one of the hijackers bears the brunt.

IC814 doesn’t treat the international espionage part as competently as its core subject of the hostage crisis. I felt it wasn’t so cohesive to give a solid subplot, there are deeper questions unanswered – like the trails of the RDX bag implanted in the plane and the terror thread. Why did our intelligence underplay it. What happened to the hijackers? Perhaps, an ‘unheard story’ version would cement those holes.