‘Shoorveer’ On Disney+ Hotstar Review: Cheap Rip-Off Of Tom Cruise’s ‘Top Gun’

Director

Kanishk Varma

Series Creator

Samar Khan

Cast

Armaan Ralhan, Regina Cassandra, Manish Chaudhary, Aadil Khan, Makrand Deshpande, Shivya Pathania, Arif Zakaria

What’s The Story

‘Shoorveer’ features the brave story of the strongest soldiers from the Air Force, Navy, and Army coming together to protect the country from a looming threat. Together they form a special task force called ‘Hawks’, the first of a kind team that depicts such excellent officers from all three fields of the armed forces. The show focuses on covert and stealthy operations, intense military training, air combat, and intelligence subterfuge the soldiers have to go through. Will the Hawks be able to save the country from the impending danger? Well, you’ll have to watch the show for that.

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What’s Good

Actors Are The Only Saving Grace

Armaan Ralhan, Manish Chaudhary and Aadil Khan are the best among the gamut of actors. Ralhan manages to bring the look and feel of a low-budget Tom Cruise from ‘Top Gun’. His attitude coupled with his chiselled look brings forward the maverick attitude of the character of Viraj Sehgal to perfection.

Regina Cassandra, Makrand Deshpande, Arif Zakaria and the other supporting cast have also performed well in the limited screen time that was offered to them.

Editor Shakti Hasija has a decent job of keeping the episodes taut and crisp. None of the episodes seems to be too long to watch, and they even don’t drag in that much. Hasija has managed to keep the show to an 8-episodic, which is commendable considering the various aspects of the armed forces the makers wished to showcase.

What’s Bad

Step-Sisterly Treatment Of The Indian Navy

Kanishk Varma’s directorial has a terrible representation of the Indian Navy. For example, the makers have created a fictional branch of the armed forces called ‘Hawks’ on the show, which takes the best of officers from the air force, army and navy. Claiming this, the makers haven’t shown a single scene of any officer from the navy. Even when the entire bunch of people from the armed forces are shown sitting in one class or meeting, just one character of a navy officer can be seen sporting a white uniform in the background. That character doesn’t have a single dialogue or scene in the entirety of the show. To add to this, throughout the entire training of the ‘Hawks’, there is not a single task where navy personnel are shown or even a task requiring the skills of an Indian navy officer shown.

The writing of the show by Sagar Pandya on a story by Bijesh Jayarajan focuses 80 per cent of screen time on three air force officers (Ralhan, Cassandra, Khan), who come out as the main leads of the show. The army officers still have some screen time and scenes where they lead the pack, but there’s nothing for the navy. That shouldn’t have been the case and in a task force like ‘Hawks’, all three segments of the armed forces should have been given equal weightage. Are the makers trying to imply that the officers of the Indian navy are in any way lesser in talent and skill than the air force and army? Or did they just want to show some high-flying aerial sequences just to make ‘Shoorveer’ more thrilling for the audiences?

Talking of aerial sequences, there are portions of ‘Shoorveer’ which are almost word-to-word ripped off from Tom Cruise’s ‘Top Gun’ franchise with Ralhan playing the maverick pilot here. While Cruise did his own stunts and the shoot was actually done inside the fighter jets, ‘Shoorveer’ just didn’t put in that much effort and decided to just show off the in-flight sequences with some green-room shoots.

When you don’t want to invest enough to shoot the in-flight sequences mid-air or even train the actors to be maverick pilots, the least you could do was hire some good VFX team. Varma and the team don’t bother to do that even. The VFX looks too cheap to even match up to other Indian shows’ standards.

Cinematographer Pratik Deora could have shown the aerial sequences or even the hand-to-hand combat sequences so much better. He hasn’t managed to bring out that charm of the armed forces that well.

Verdict

Samar Khan’s ‘Shoorveer’ is a cheap rip-off of ‘Top Gun’. It could have easily been a show about the Indian air force. But in a quest to be different, the makers decided to also include the army and the navy and make the show about a special task force called ‘Hawks’, which ultimately turns out to be a terrible treatment doled out to the Indian navy. Any show on the Indian armed forces needs a lot of research which doesn’t eventually show up in ‘Shoorveer’. It surely is a mood spoiler. Totally Avoid. I am going with 1 star.