From Lootere to Ae Watan Mere Watan, Here are the Top Weekly OTT Releases

This week, we have a piping hot buffet of new digital releases across genres. We have two Indian originals, post-theatrical releases, a high-budget sci-fi saga, and Marvel Studio’s hit series making a return.

One of the major releases of the week is Sara Ali Khan’s Ae Watan Mere Watan which will take you to the pre-Indepence Bombay. Khan is seen playing the celebrated freedom fighter, Usha Mehta. While the gallant leader dedicated her entire life to India, this Amazon Original will take you to the Quit India Movement, when the college-going Usha started an illegal radio station to broadcast messages from prominent leaders from various secret locations.

Next in Line is Hansal Mehta’s Lootere which will revolve around a cargo ship hijacked by Somalian pirates in Africa. The show gives a refreshing break from repetitive plotlines in crime thrillers and will keep you guessing what comes next.

Netflix’s 3 Body Problem is another big-budget release of the week. It offers an impressive cocktail of cultural, social, and scientific conundrums.

Marvel Studios also have a big release in the form of X-Men’ 97 which is a revival of sorts for the long-running hit show, X-Men: The Animated Series. However, whether the show sets the stage for other live adaptations is yet to be confirmed. Another major release by Marvel lined up for release this year is Wolverine & Deadpool.

Besides the ones listed below, Netflix’s biography film Shirley is also a good binge-watch option for the weekend, which brings from the page of American history the rivetting tale of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to be elected to the United States Congress.

True crime documentary enthusiasts could watch Netflix’s Homicide: New York, in which investigators, officers, and detectives discuss some of the most notorious murder cases.

With that, here are the top OTT releases of the week that we recommend.

Ae Watan Mere Watan

When: Now Streaming

Where: Prime Video

During the Quit India Movement of 1942, a young college student in Bombay recognised the power of radio and started an illegal secret radio station to broadcast messages from Mahatma Gandhi and other prominent leaders across India, with the help of a few amateur radio operators.

While this endeavour lasted only three months, it played an important role in India’s struggle for Independence.

In this biopic, Sara Ali Khan plays the college student Usha Mehta, who later emerged as an important figure in Indian history. The film will tell you in detail how the rebellious freedom fighter started and continued to operate this station from various undisclosed locations and the various challenges she faced.

The fact that she was a Gandhian and her father, a judge under the British Raj, opposed her actions is also portrayed.

Fighter

When: Now Streaming

Where: Netflix

Fighter is a visually striking patriotic drama about a few fighter pilots of the Indian Air Force who have vowed to protect their nation against all threats and dangers. Among these valiant officers are Hrithik Roshan, Deepika Padukone, Karan Singh Grover and Manushi Chillar, headed by squadron leader Anil Kapoor. Hrithik’s character is a rebel who doesn’t shy away from bending the rules when it comes to justice, an attitude that doesn’t sit well with Anil Kapoor’s squadron leader, putting the two at loggerheads with each other in almost every scene.

If you find yourself amazed at the mannerisms of a few characters coming off as too professional, that’s because those are real-life Indian Air Force cadets bringing a slice of their everyday lives to the silver screen. You’ll also find plenty of references to the 2019 Pulwama attack, the 2019 Balakot airstrike and the 2019 India–Pakistan border skirmishes.

Since Fighter has used the same cinematographic techniques as Dune and other James Bonde movies, it offers plenty of jaw-dropping aerial action sequences, some of which are likely to remind you of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick.

Lootere

When: Now Streaming

Where: Hotstar

Hansal Mehta’s (Scam 1992) will take you to the Somalian waters where a cargo ship with an Asian crew gets hijacked by Somalian pirates. The ship is owned by Vikrant, a nicotine-addicted businessman of Indian origin who has a lot more on stake than what appears at the surface and is desperately counting on it being retrieved. Rajat Kapoor plays the captain of the ship and delivers a fine performance.

The eight-episode-long show will give you a taste of crime, corruption, and dark secrets harbouring in African waters, with a special focus on Indian businessmen established there for decades. Get ready for thrill, knotty twists, a flavour of dark murkiness of the crime world.

The first two episodes have been released, and the other eight will be out every week. Shot in Hindi, Lootere can also be streamed in Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, and Kannada.

3 Body Problem

When: Now Streaming

Where: Netflix

3 Body Problem is a Sci-Fi drama adapted from Chinese engineer-author Liu Cixin’s novel of the same name, which serves as the first in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.

The show begins with an astrophysicist witnessing her father’s public execution during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Cut to the future, she is taken to a secret radar base by the military. Meanwhile, in the present, a lot of strange unexplained phenomena are happening – many physicists committing suicide, prominent research being discovered as wrong, and all the stars blinking on and off!

All in all, the show offers plenty of complex scientific problems, cultural challenges, extra-terrestrial dangers, and lots of suspense. The show has been adapted for television by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff, D. B. Weiss and Alexander Woo.

X-MEN ‘97

When: Now Streaming

Where: Hotstar

X-Men ’97 is a spiritual sequence to X-Men: The Animated Series, which ran on air from 1992-1995. The show picks up right after the events of the original series and introduces the viewers to a world where the X-Men leader, Professor X, is no longer in charge – leaving his proteges, Cyclops and Jean Grey, in charge.

The world still somewhat dislikes the mutant X-Men, who are anyway hell-bent on saving the world from all the dangers, irrespective of the bigotry they face on a daily basis.

Many actors from the original series have lent their voices, including Cal Dodd, Lenore Zann, George Buza, Catherine Disher, Chris Potter, Alison Sealy-Smith, Adrian Hough, Christopher Britton, Alyson Court, Lawrence Bayne, and Ron Rubin. The first two episodes have now been released, while the rest will be out every Wednesday at 12:30 pm IST.

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Ranbir Kapoor in ‘Animal’

“My head is an animal…,” goes a line in a famous song from the Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men. Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s protagonists — thick-headed creatures of privilege and entitlement — are all badly-behaved men who could easily pass for monsters. After Arjun Reddy (2017) and Kabir Singh (2019), two films about a chain-smoking doctor with anger issues, the director returns with Animal, his second Hindi feature, about a chain-smoking engineer with deep-seated daddy issues. Yet no matter how bleak and paleolithic his view of human instincts, he also wants us to stand in awe of his heroes, even admire and empathise with them.

Ranvijay (Ranbir Kapoor) is a rich Delhi brat who grows up idolising his father, industrialist Balbir Singh (Anil Kapoor). Balbir is stern and emotionally unavailable, which messes up Ranvijay’s circuitry from childhood. He steals away from school for his dad’s birthday; years later, when his own brother-in-law addresses Balbir as ‘papa’, he gets angry and territorial. Familial terms annoy him in a general sense too — for instance, his childhood crush Geetanjali (Rashmika Mandanna) calling him ‘bhaiya’ (brother) publicly. Now a grown man, with a bike and bun mullet, he commands Geetanjali to break off her engagement with another dude and marry him instead. It’s unexplained why Geetanjali responds so fast (perhaps she has watched Kabir Singh and understands the consequences if she doesn’t).

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Ranvijay and Geetanjali emigrate to the US, raise two kids, spend their initial marital life in unaltered bliss; not a glimpse of which Vanga has the patience or delicacy to show. His films are charged and propelled by twisted notions of love, but he has no real knack for the mechanics of love stories. Even a simple romantic interlude, without a tease or a snub or an unprovoked sexual boast, becomes too difficult for the director and his co-writers Pranay Reddy Vanga and Saurabh Gupta to handle. Instead, they cut directly to six years after, when Balbir is shot by unidentified assailants on a golf course. Returning home post-haste, Ranvijay, now a bearded brute, takes charge, his intentions to fortify his family’s safety clashing with his all-consuming thirst for revenge.

Animal (Hindi)

Director: Sandeep Reddy Vanga

Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, Bobby Deol, Rashmika Mandanna, Tripti Dimri, Babloo Prithiveeraj

Run-time: 203 minutes

Storyline: Ranvijay, a troubled man, dispenses violent retribution after his beloved father is attacked

Kabir Singh, a monster hit, was widely criticised for glamourising misogyny and toxic masculinity (the hero slapped his girlfriend, OD’ed after a heartbreak, spouted self-pitying gasconades like “I’m not a rebel without a cause… nor a murderer with a hand blade). Ranvijay, very much a murderer with a hand blade, is Vanga’s cheeky expansion of this cinematic landscape. There is a stream of steadily escalating provocations that are pure critic-bait. The word ‘toxic’ is uttered in the opening minutes. There are two kinds of men, Ranvijay proclaims to Geetanjali: ‘alphas’ and all the other poetry-writing wimps. His father’s company — Swastik Steel — is not a ‘Nazi’ enterprise, the hero takes pains to point out. It’s a juvenile, self-aggrandising approach to filmmaking: a commercially successful director showboating to fans while keeping his detractors fuming.

Also Read | Arjun Reddy, Kabir Singh and artisitic freedom

Unlike The Godfather, an obvious model for this film, Vanga isn’t ‘investigating’ chauvinism or codes of honour in a large patriarchal household; it seems ingrained in his general approach to plot and character and dialogue. Ranvijay’s territorialism — he is Michael and Sonny rolled into one — naturally extends to all female members of his family (“You are a strong, independent woman,” he tells his elder sister, having killed off her equally-cruel husband). His mother stands by on the edges of the plot. Geetanjali is a more vociferous character than past Vanga heroines — there are a handful of lengthy fights between her and Ranvijay — but it is revealing that her breaking point in the story comes with him leaving the marital bed; a more crushing offence in the writers’ conception than the violence or neglect.

Ranbir Kapoor in a scene from ‘Animal’

For all the bluster and self-contradiction in Vanga’s stories, he appears somewhat on track when exploring and unclasping the male psyche. Because, each time Animal becomes an action film, it loses its edge. An extended battle in a hotel lobby is suitably messy but has the overall design of music videos. Kapoor hacks and slashes over music, blood splattering everywhere, yet the scene lacks the pizzazz and punch of a Tarantino or a Karthik Subbaraj. It’s left to Bobby Deol —details of whose role are better left unrevealed — to introduce some much-needed ferality to this film.

Vanga has a circuitous way of editing that occasionally pays off but often stalls and annoys. The film is simultaneously too bloated and too thin for its three-hour-plus runtime. Ranbir Kapoor spins a career mixtape: the swagger of Sanju meets the cockiness of Bombay Velvet meets the angst of Rockstar. Anil Kapoor does much of the emotional heavy-lifting with those tired, regretful eyes. There are a couple of intriguing performances on the fringes; our picks are Shakti Kapoor as Balbir’s soft-spoken consigliere and Babloo Prithiveeraj as a comically-outsized heavy.

Animal had the chance to claw out a fresh, psychology-driven path for Hindi action movies, at a juncture when it’s challenged (and frequently outstripped) by superior products from the South. The raw, lacerating violence that Vanga promised his critics, he hardly delivers. Like many before him, he seems more tempted by franchise potential than telling a controlled, coherent story. “Confidence is a medicine but…,” a doctor tries to tell Ranvijay. She can’t finish her sentence. He has already shut her off.

Animal is currently in theatres

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Tag: Anil Kapoor