‘IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack’ Is Competent, Evokes a Sense of Deja Vu

Weaving archival footage into a film/series that is based on real-life incidents, is an art form in itself. Most filmmakers prefer doing it in the end credits, where they place the fictitious and actual versions besides one another, only to apparently gloat about how faithfully they’ve managed to recreate the person or place. Sometimes the reel looks nothing like the real, and that’s fine. You ask yourself – did it capture the essence? If they did, then does it matter? 

IC 814 has a stacked cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Manoj Pahwa, Kumud Mishra, Arvind Swamy, Kanwaljit Singh, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Aditya Srivastava – and we haven’t even left the war room yet. There’s the likes of Amrita Puri, Dia Mirza, Anupam Tripathi (who broke out with Squid Games), Patralekha Paul and Vijay Varma, playing Captain Sharan, the pilot of the real life Indian Airlines flight, whose book Flight into Fear (2000) the series is based on. It’s a line-up that can impress anyone from the outset. 

However, these big names don’t necessarily have the impact one might expect, and that majorly comes down to Sinha and his co-writer Trishant Srivastava’s lines. Most of the dialogue encompasses these fine actors barking protocol to each other, or providing functional exposition. I kept waiting for that one sublime scene where we would see this ensemble feeding off of each other’s radically different energies, but instead they kept getting in each other’s way. 

Sinha’s show is not the first film/series centred on a hijack, it most likely won’t be the last. There was Rohit Shetty’s Zameen (2003) – a hyper-jingoistic reimagining of the same incident. More recently, there have been films like Neerja (2016) and Yodha (2024) that have followed the template of milking a hijack for thrill, catharsis and national duty. Sinha’s show feels like a more grounded version of events, intent on highlighting the internal push-and-pulls that take place behind the scenes in a national crisis like this. The inter-departmental blame game begins – how R&AW (Research & Analysis Wing) should have informed IB (Intelligence Bureau) about any intel, completely overlooking the fact how agencies try to undercut each other during peacetime. All these fragmented pieces of a nation’s security framework should come together, overcome their differences and do what is right for the hostages. It’s an unenviable responsibility that most bureaucrats would like to shirk, lest things go sideways and accountability falls on them. 

One of the biggest failings of Sinha’s show is how little of it feels like its own. Sinha’s contemporary, Hansal Mehta, recently made a show around Somalian pirates called Lootere (on Disney+Hotstar), which, despite liberally borrowing from many Western films/shows, always felt like its own show. Lootere had its own rhythm, style and found interesting ways to subvert audiences’ expectations. Maybe it helps that Mehta’s show was fully fictionalised, as opposed to Sinha’s – who has to follow a set pattern of events that did take place, and cannot take too many creative liberties. Even so, what’s exhausting, is how much of a feeling of deja vu evoked by most sequences. I couldn’t help but think about Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006) and a dozen other films – as bearded men and young, haunted-looking boys take charge of the plane, followed by tense negotiations, the news cycle desperate for a scapegoat, the vain, reckless bureaucrats worried about how their legacy will be shaped in the aftermath of this crisis, instead of being concerned for the passengers themselves. 

There’s a lot of material to delve into, but I couldn’t help but feel how the tension in Sinha’s show always feels second-hand. The torture scenes, the portrayal of Islamic radicals, the thawing dynamic between the cabin crew and their captors – feel like discarded portions of better shows. One of the show’s best lines – “Coffee is like religion, not open to interpretation. Tea is like blind faith. In whatever form we might get it, we take it” feels too writerly to emerge from within the show’s setting. Sinha and his crew could’ve laid the ground by indicating a bureaucrat’s interest in literature in an earlier scene, which they don’t do. As a result, the line emerges from nowhere.   

Which is not to say that Sinha’s six-part series has no flourishes whatsoever. There’s the attempt to humanise the “terrorists”, especially through the character of ‘Burger’ (Diljhon), an English speaking militant, who claims he learned English by trying to mimic Americans, who had come to his country and levelled his land. “It’s your privilege that death is still a tragedy for people like you,” Burger tells the cabin crew, after they dispose of the body of a passenger. It’s a fine piece of dialogue, but feels too sophisticatedly phrased from someone like Burger. The line could easily be a tweet.

There’s the sensational Manoj Pahwa, who finds a different energy in Sinha’s productions. As the chief negotiator Mukul Mohan, Pahwa leans hard against the terrorists, finding an equilibrium between being hard-nosed and levity. It’s a remarkable balance he maintains during his game of poker with the terrorists, squeezing them to find out who breaks first. I was taken by Vijay Varma’s performance as the captain – it’s a hard character to play, given there’s little room for histrionics. Much like Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips (2014) and Rajat Kapoor in the recent Lootere, Varma puts a price on every word that comes out of his mouth. Every little act of his could either cause additional casualties, or give security agencies an inch during negotiations. There’s a fascinating thread in the show when a retired defence officer argues with a civilian relative about sacrificing 180 lives, in exchange for three high-value terrorists, who could potentially kill ten times the number of hostages, if freed. Is the life of a soldier or a civilian less valuable than a militant? How does one objectively put a value on how much a life is worth?

One of the biggest victories of Sinha’s show is how it concludes on an ambiguous, sombre note. Was the rescue of the passengers (except one) a victory? A defeat? Was it a bargain? While it does feel like a relief on some level, Sinha’s show never feels triumphant. Instead, he lists out the crimes carried out by the three freed terrorists – and casualties inflicted by each of them. I wish Sinha had chosen a lane – making a grittier, more fact-based, meticulously replicating real-life incidents. Or gone in a completely opposite direction, playing hard and loose with facts, but instead focused on maintaining a tonal consistency. IC 814 hangs somewhere in the middle, as a show whose overall competence remains one of the most frustrating things about it.