Red Alert- The War Within

Rating**

An innocent gets caught in the crossfire between the police and a band of Naxals,deep in the jungles of Andhra Pradesh.

That’s the thrust of ‘Red Alert’,which tells us that these men and women are brave soldiers fighting for justice,and that the state is a brute force trying to stamp out their existence. Ananth Mahadevan’s new film,based on a true incident,could have been an interesting,if not entirely novel,look at the proliferating conflict zones over-run by opposing forces if he had kept Bollywood-style artifice out of it.

But his problem is exactly that which besets filmmakers wishing to create reality without sacrificing musical scores : despite all the effort,it looks like everyone’s kitted out for a movie,marred by naïve,woolly-headed points-of-view.

Suniel Shetty,trying very earnestly to look the part,plays a poor man who’s forced into joining Ashish Vidyarthi’s ‘dalam’. All he wants is some money to give his kids a good education ; all Vidyarthi,armed with madly over-the-top,exaggerated gestures,wants is to shoot cops.

To that end,we see the ‘dalam’ being trained in guns and guerilla warfare,inter-personal chats between the men and women in the camp,combing operations, commercial interests being served at the cost of the poor villagers,and political plotting to cover everyone’s posterior : Mahadevan doesn’t leave anything out of his worthy plot, which seesaws between keeping it straight and creating a shoot-and-scoot drama,but doesn’t have the skill to pull it off.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com