That one specific yellow-tinted flashback in the middle of the second act looks like it was color-graded on an expired iPad from 2011. If I'm honest, it immediately pulls you right out of the nineteenth-century dust and gunpowder of the North-West Frontier. Hindi films have long struggled with the digital sheen that makes even a mud-caked battlefield feel scrubbed and sterile, and Anurag Singh’s Kesari doesn't entirely escape that clinical trap, though it fights against it with every burning thatch and flying arrow it can muster. We are dropped straight into the thick of Saragarhi without much preamble, twenty-one Sikh soldiers of the British Indian Army staring down ten thousand Pashtun tribesmen across a stretch of desolate rocky outcrop that looks punishingly dry.

Singh directs with a blunt-force instrument rather than a scalpel, keeping the camera tethered to the dirt and boots of the men rather than soaring off into unnecessary aerial grandeur. The screenplay by Singh and Girish Kohli manages to sketch out individual personalities for a handful of these doomed soldiers without turning the barracks into a standard-issue recruiting poster, which is a minor miracle given how easily patriotic cinema slips into shouting matches. They joke about bad cooking, they tease the youngest recruit about his beard, they smoke, they argue about pay and home villages. It breathes. Then the drums start beating across the valley and the film locks its jaw and refuses to let go for the next ninety minutes of sustained combat.

Akshay Kumar anchors the whole enterprise with a performance that relies almost entirely on physical weight and a very specific kind of weary authority. He plays Havildar Ishar Singh not as a flag-waving monument but as a seasoned soldier who is tired of bureaucratic nonsense from British officers yet fiercely protective of the men under his command. He has this way of dropping his chin and narrowing his eyes whenever a commanding officer starts talking about empire, letting you see the decades of resentment simmering beneath the turbans and gold embroidery. It’s a step up from the hyper-nationalistic autopilot he’s sometimes drifted into over the last decade, reminding us of the grounded intensity he brought to something like Airlift back when he was picking more interesting scripts.

Parineeti Chopra pops up as his deceased wife in those aforementioned visual-stain flashbacks, and the romantic framing device is completely extraneous, functioning mostly as a narrative tax the film has to pay for commercial viability. She is fine with what she is given, but the chemistry exists entirely in a vacuum of misty-eyed poetry and slow-motion dupatta wafting that feels imported from an entirely different genre of romantic drama. Meanwhile, Suvinder Vicky as Sepoy Gurmukh Singh brings a quiet, devastating gravity to the ranks, his eyes doing the heavy lifting during moments when dialogue would only ruin the grim realization of their arithmetic. There's a supporting actor playing a nervous junior sepoy near the end whose dialogue is so obviously loop-dubbed in a quiet studio that his voice bounces off the canyon walls in a completely different acoustic universe, and it's a small thing that bugged me every single time he spoke.

Anurag Singh stages the skirmishes with an escalating sense of spatial claustrophobia, utilizing the fort's collapsing walls and dwindling ammunition supply to ratchet up the tension without relying on shaky-cam gymnastics. You always know where the enemy is coming from, where the gaps in the stone are, and how many bullets are left in the chamber. That spatial clarity is increasingly rare in modern action filmmaking where editors seem terrified of letting a wide shot breathe for more than two seconds. The soundtrack by Tanishk Bagchi and Jasbir Jassi delivers the expected thunderous dhols and soaring martial anthems, though one particular battle-cry theme repeats so frequently during the third quarter that it starts feeling like a cue card telling you exactly when to get goosebumps.

The ideological architecture of the movie is complicated precisely because it refuses to sand down the edges of its colonial context, even as it celebrates the fierce, autonomous code of honor among these specific soldiers fighting under a flag they had complicated reasons to loathe. Ishar Singh explicitly talks back to the pompous British major who views the men as expendable colonial assets rather than human beings, anchoring the heroism in brotherhood and self-preservation rather than abstract loyalty to Queen Victoria. It's a tricky tightrope walk that contemporary Bollywood movies often fumble, sliding either into blind jingoism or cynical revisionism, but the script grounds its politics in the immediate dirt of survival.

When the final breaches are made and the hand-to-hand combat dissolves into a chaotic mess of bayonets, daggers, and bare fists, Kesari doesn't look for easy grace notes or poetic deaths for every single character. Men die messy, unglamorous deaths in the mud, gasping for breath with arrows through their throats, their saffron turbans coming unwound in the dust. It’s relentless. That lack of theatrical cleansing makes the carnage feel earned, a brutal testament to a forgotten tactical stand that deserves its cinematic real estate far more than yet another sleek thriller about cross-border espionage.

You leave the theater with the ringing of iron and the low hum of those distant war drums still vibrating in your teeth, which is usually the sign of an action movie that did its job with some degree of muscle and conviction. It is not an artistic revolution in historical drama, nor does it completely avoid the heavy-handed emotional cues that plague so many commercial Hindi movies trying to balance spectacle with sorrow. But it respects the mud, it respects the physical toll of holding a line against impossible odds, and it gives Akshay Kumar a canvas big enough to make his weather-beaten face look like a map of the entire campaign.