There is a scene in the newly released Pakistan Air Force action movie Sherdil where our hero, the hotshot pilot Haris Mustafa (Mikaal Zulfiqar), feels the need to relieve himself in the middle of a snooker match. After all, he and his best buddy think, what better than to test out a newly renovated men’s room. Once inside the sparkly clean toilet, Haris is immediately dumbfounded by a strange design decision: the urinal is installed three feet too high.

As Haris ponders, his superior walks past him, pulls up a stool, and relieves himself. On his way out, the superior gestures that Haris should use his brain to find a solution.

For some reason, this particular scene stayed with me — and not just because this is the second time we see someone in a Pakistani movie relieve themselves on-screen (Shamoon Abbasi did something similar just a few months back in Gumm). No, I believe the answer had to have a deeper aesthetic significance.

Despite some good visual effects, there is hardly any plot in the air force movie Sherdil, let alone a cohesive storyline in its two-and-a-half hour run-time

Well, significance it had, as I realised on my way out of the movie. The officer was telling director Azfar Jaffri and writer-producer Noman Khan to use their brain. Pity they didn’t listen.

Sherdil is the second such movie I’ve seen this year where there is hardly any plot — let alone a cohesive storyline — in its two-and-a-half hour running time. What we get is a hodgepodge of off-the-cuff, daft collection of scenes that barely make sense.

Haris is a veteran fighter pilot’s grandson who rebels against his rich dad. Like grandpa (inspired by a real life martyr) — who we see take out an Indian jet in the 1965 Indo-Pak war at the beginning of the movie — the young man wants to soar the skies and fight the enemy. Well, Haris does exactly that right before the intermission, when, finally decorated as a Flight Lieutenant, he engages an Indian jet in a dogfight over Pakistani soil.

After nearly dying in the skirmish, Haris is somehow sent abroad to an elite international flight school that trains the best of the best from a handful of countries, including India. As you may have guessed, the Indian pilot, Flight Lft. Arun Veerani (Hassan Niazi), is the same guy who outmaneuvered Haris in the dogfight. After some sarcastic verbal abuse, the two become best drinking buddies over glasses of lassi and whisky.

Arun also woos Sarah Francis (Sabeeka Imam) — a Kelly McGillis rip-off from Top Gun, sporting a Russian accent. The trio dance and party and, out of the blue, a local mob boss kidnaps Sabrina (a wooden Armeena Rana Khan whose dubbing is not even in her own voice), Haris’ love interest who hates the air force and yet has flown in from Pakistan to look him up.

After saving Sabrina from the local gangster, Arun and Haris face off once again in the climax. As the movie ended, I asked a Sherdil supporter one simple question: can you tell me exactly what the story is?

Haris is a veteran fighter pilot’s grandson who rebels against his rich dad. Like grandpa (inspired by a real life martyr) — who we see take out an Indian jet in the 1965 Indo-Pak war at the beginning of the movie — the young man wants to soar the skies and fight the enemy.

“Friendship between an Indian and a Pakistani pilot,” he said, adding an “I guess” with a shrug at the end.

“I guess,” then, would best surmise what Sherdil is.

I guess, Sherdil is about boyhood, camaraderie, patriotism, love, and Indo-Pak peace. I also guess that the movie’s comedic tone, and its intention to portray pilots as juvenile pranksters, was utterly unintentional.

What I definitely know is that there is next to no screenplay, the dialogues are laughably bad, the acting is amateurish, the colour grade is harsh and unpleasing, most lens choices in shots are wrong, and the lighting, in particular, is inconsistent. In one scene that has Haris and his grandmother (played by Samina Ahmed), the medium shot and the wide shot (with both of them in the frame) are lit differently; the lamp behind them is overly bright — in filmmaking terms, this is called blowing out the highlights.

This is Jafri’s fourth film credit; it shouldn’t be this amateur, even if he has a first-time producer writing the movie.

Sherdil has three good things though: Hassan Niazi (who enters the story too late to do any good), excellent photorealistic visual effects, and the end credits.

Published in Dawn, ICON, March 31st, 2019

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