In November 2008, India was rocked by a rapid succession of terrorist bombings and shootings over the course of four days, killing 164 people and wounding another 300+. From November 26 through November 29, 10 men carried out 12 separate attacks, including bombing the Taj Mahal Hotel (not the actual Taj Mahal mausoleum) and a Jewish community center. India knows these attacks as 26/11, referencing the attacks of 9/11, and it has served as a source of national pain and sensitivity. According to Wiki, only one of the attackers survived the bombings and died in jail. The masterminds have otherwise not been arrested or prosecuted for their crimes.
Kabir Khan’s new film, Phantom, presents a revenge fantasy wherein a rogue department departs on an illegal mission in order to execute vigilante justice on the various perpetrators. The film explodes onto the screen with a car accident. Some Indian guy driving in Chicago gets rear ended by a big white bubba who flees the scene. Spurned into a case of road rage, the Indian guy and the Bubba chase each other through the streets of Chicago leaving vehicular wreakage in their wake. They stop on a bridge for a fist fight, when the Bubba is kicked off the bridge. The Indian guy is found guilty…and suddenly we’re whisked away to a few weeks earlier for another action sequence.
The Research and Analysis Wing (R.A.W.) of the Indian government has been humiliated again in its attempts to capture the masterminds of 26/11. They decide to go rogue. Finding a guy who has no history or photo, they find Daniyal Khan (Saif Ali Khan), a dishonorably discharged soldier living in the middle of the nowhere among the snow, who is also the road rage guy from the introductory scene. After finally convincing the reluctant recluse, R.A.W. informs Daniyal that he is on an unofficial mission that will be disavowed should he be captured or killed.
Implausibly, Phantom is a jaunty world-traveling spy movie that takes us to London, Chicago, Syria, Pakistan, and then back home to Mumbai. Kabir Khan fills the movie with gadgets befitting a James Bond film, including a AA battery filled with poison gas that gets placed in a showerhead with much acrobatics needed. Daniyal is out to identify and kill all of the supposed masterminds of the attacks, without judge or jury. Because this is Bollywood, we also have to sit through a cricket tournament and a wedding. There is so much Indian propaganda and nationalism crammed into Phantom, it feels almost like a satire of itself.
That sense of satire isn’t lessened by the presence of hunky Saif Ali Khan as the lead. The main problem is purely aesthetic. Saif is studly, with all the right looks for a model, with one big exception: he is somewhat cross-eyed. When Kabir Khan gives us a strong propagandic image of Daniyal standing strong against a sunset looking into the camera, Saif’s natural cross-eyed look undercuts the perfection in a way that makes the whole image fall into parody. To be fair, this isn’t a problem when Saif is acting and the camera is moving, but Kabir Khan repeatedly gives striking images of Saif just looking, and it undercuts the movie even more than the simplistic dialogue1 (or at least the simplistic subtitles), or the ridiculous Bondian nationalistic revenge plot.
If the plot is American 80s spy movies meets Homeland, the imagery is pure propaganda. In 2001, months before the 9/11 Attacks, Jean-Jacques Annaud directed an American/British/French/German/Irish co-production called Enemy at the Gates, about the use of propaganda in Stalingrad. Annaud’s visual style pulled from classic Russian and American propaganda, as well as Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, in order to create a visual metaphor for the events within the movie. Khan combines this heavy handed and beautiful style and combines it with images and editing straight out of Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State. The result is somewhat of an unholy marriage that resembles an even more nationalistic Michael Bay which was mercilessly mocked in Team America: World Police.
If it seems like I’m being extraordinarily hard on Phantom, it’s only because everything in it feels familiar in its American origins. Throughout the Cold War, we would frequently create nationalistic spy movies about executing bad guys without trial. Showtime’s Sleeper Cell told the story of a deep undercover American agent penetrating a terrorist cell in order to destroy their plans for attacking American soil. Any disgust felt at the single-minded anti-Pakistani morality of Phantom is only felt because it mirrors American fantasies so precisely.
It’s hard to criticize. Back in 2008 (7 years after 9/11), we were still churning out things like Traitor, a similar travelogue spy movie about terrorism, that were somehow critically acclaimed. Unlike Traitor, Phantom has a sense of joy and glee that recalls Team America more than the gritty realism of modern American spy thrillers. Phantom is a gross, immoral, nationalistic spy thriller that’s brisk, gorgeous, breezy, and almost silly. Stylish and cool, Phantom‘s primary worth is in reflecting our own sensibilities back at us.
1The dialogue is really basic and kind of terrible, but it is also subtitled so I can’t really rag on it in the review proper. Still, my favorite moment of the film was when Daniyal meets a male contact who is undercover as a baker. The code phrase he uses, “The guys told me I had to try your sugar-lumps.” The response he gets? “I’m sorry. They’re only available in the evening.” Amazing.