Holiday (2014)

Here is an interesting fact, producers of this movie wanted the title ‘Holiday’ for this movie, but its rights were with Pooja Bhatt, as she had already made a movie by this name in 2006, you may not remember it as the movie had nothing worth remembering, so the producers approached her and requested for the title, which she denied, maybe she wants to do a sequel. Anyhow the producers instead of going for any other title added ‘A Soldier is Never off Duty’ to the tagline, while Pooja Bhatt kept cursing them in media.

So as you may have already seen in the trailer, the movie deals with a soldier Virat Bakshi (Akshay Kumar) who has come home on holidays, and how he gets entangled in a terrorist plot and how he stops the bad guys forms the rest of the story. So the next question that arise is, is the movie any good? Surely it is.

Without going into any specifics of the story line, the movie is about sleeper cells that are used by terrorists and our protagonist’s battle against them. The movie is fast paced with enough light moments built inside to keep the audience at ease in an otherwise tense subject; you keep on wondering about the next move of our hero as well as the villain. What really appreciable about the screenplay is the way both the protagonist and antagonist approach to outsmart each other, it is good to see some thought given to the planning and analysis part in the movie, where other movies generally doesn’t go into the details about how the villain or hero deduced certain information, this movie is all about that, so good work.

Having said that, the movie is not without its flaws, first and foremost, Akshay Kumar is shown as the member of an intelligence agency however during the entire events of the movie, he does not once bother to involve his agency or superiors into the problem at hand, he enlist the help of his friends at certain times but his agency remains nowhere in picture while he keeps on making dangerous decisions which is seriously odd. If his character was shown to be of a simple army officer without any backup than probably the movie would have made greater sense, secondly the entire Govind’s track looks forced on the screenplay, like they decided to include it at a later stage of filming, but still it’s nice to see him on screen after a long time, and last drawback of the movie is its music, no song make an impression barring the last some ‘naina’ which could actually bring tears to your eyes, amazing lyrics.

The high point of the movie is the internal portion when Akshay attempts to stop an immediate terrorist attack with the help of his friends.

All and all the movie is a worthy entrant into the 100 cr club, unlike some other garbage. Go for this one.

Rating ***1/2