Tehran: John Abraham’s geopolitical thriller isn’t smarter than a fifth grader, no matter how many newspapers it reads

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John Abraham in a still from Tehran.

The most interesting thing about the movie, however, is how it positions its star; you cannot help but read it as Abraham’s most self-expressive film in years. He plays a special cell police officer called Rajeev Kumar, a burly hotshot who’s drawn into a geopolitical mess when some Iranian terrorists target Israeli officials on Indian soil, leaving an innocent young girl dead. Outraged at how two warring nations could use India as a battleground and turn its people into collateral damage, he takes it upon himself to first identify the perpetrator of the attack, and then — this is where the movie jumps the shark — bring them to justice by sneaking into Iran.

Rajeev somehow finds a way to annoy three separate governments, including his own. But he pushes through, driven by a sense of justice and patriotism. There is no shortage of actors in Bollywood who would pretend to motivated by these same ideas, both personally and professionally. But with John, the ‘josh’ feels genuine. Whereas most of his colleagues would prefer to maintain an arm’s distance from making political statements, John flexes his biceps, cracks that crooked grin of his, and hurls a motorbike at the idea of hesitation. But if there’s an art to remaining apolitical on screen, John has perfected it.

In both Vedaa and The Diplomat, he was motivated by personal choices; his politics were incidental to the plot of those films. The movie Batla House was similarly dangerous in what it was proposing. John has said that he’d never make a movie like The Kashmir Files, but he doesn’t seem to realise that he already has. In Tehran, which is the cinematic equivalent of a shrug, Rajeev Kumar literally declares that he won’t take sides in the Israel-Iran conflict; all that he cares about is avenging the death of a young child. This makes no sense; it’s antithetical to the very DNA of the film. It’s almost like watching a Batman movie in which the Dark Knight concerns himself not with catching criminals, but with trying out the best new restaurants in town.

In one scene, it is shown that the primary antagonist — a maniacal murderer who lives by a skewed code — is a supporter of the Free Palestine movement. This, more than any nuclear war nonsense, is his primary grouse against the Israeli regime. Perhaps it’s the film’s way of underlining how, even a righteous movement can be hijacked by fundamentalists. But, if it wanted to say this, maybe it should’ve just come out with it. This isn’t Superman, where director James Gunn took (the correct) political stance via fake placeholder nations. Tehran is set in the real world. It alludes to a real-life conflict; it needed to have the courage of its convictions. A more cynical reading of the film would lead you to assume that it is conflating a terrorist organisation’s crimes with the plight of the Palestinian people, which, by the way, Rajeev mocks in one scene.

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John Abraham and Manushi Chhillar in Tehran.

While Gunn kept pretending that Superman wasn’t about real life and quietly communicated everything he wanted to via his film, Tehran keeps insisting that it’s about grave real-world injustices, but it ends up being a movie about nothing. Rajeev Kumar isn’t rescuing a person in peril; he’s safeguarding the very idea of sovereignty. How could a foreign nation encroach upon our land and carry out an operation that causes harm to our citizens? Rajeev is scandalised by the mere thought. Nobody tell him about the Chinese. But somebody please tell him that a movie about invaders and occupiers simply cannot sit on the fence, especially when its own protagonist is shown to be bothered by such behaviours.

But does this mind-your-own-business attitude stem from John’s own personality? He has long been a lone wolf of sorts, having worked with everybody from the Bhatts to the Chopras, from the Jayantilal Gadas and Bhushan Kumars to the Sajid Nadiadwalas and the Tauranis. He has also starred in films directed by Deepa Mehta, Anurag Kashyap, Vivek Agnihotri and Vishal Bhardwaj. It’s quite the bold spectrum. Only someone who stays in their lane and doesn’t talk out of school can get away with something like this, especially in a clique-dominated industry like Bollywood. In other words: being apolitical pays. The recent film Dhadak 2 proved that it is possible to balance Bollywood melodrama with an abrasive personality, whereas Tehran opens by revealing that it probably flunked geography in school. You be the judge.