The helmets in Fighter never quite look like they fit right on anyone's head, which is a small thing, sure, but it bugged me from the very first runway sequence. There is a specific kind of padding used in actual flight gear that seems entirely absent from the props department's budget, leaving Hrithik Roshan and his squadron of top gunners looking slightly like they are wearing oversized bowling balls strapped beneath their chins. Bollywood movies have historically struggled with the tactile reality of military hardware, preferring the sleek silhouette of a mirrored visor over the sweaty, cramped claustrophobia of a real cockpit. Siddharth Anand directs with his usual gloss, sweeping his camera across airbases that look less like Srinagar and more like architectural renderings commissioned by a real estate developer who just discovered drone footage. The screenplay, co-written by Anand and Ramon Chibb, relies heavily on the kind of dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a video game cutscene played at low volume through a blown speaker. Characters do not talk to each other so much as they recite briefing notes while staring intently into the middle distance.

Hrithik Roshan plays Patty, a pilot whose call sign is meant to convey both his aggressive airborne instincts and his general refusal to play by the bureaucratic rules laid down by nervous men in Delhi. He handles the swagger with the ease of a man who has spent two decades calibrating his profile for maximum impact against any available light source, leaning against jet intakes with the studied negligence of a fashion editorial. Beside him is Deepika Padukone as Minni, bringing a coiled, slightly defensive intensity to scenes that otherwise threaten to dissolve into airshows with a plot attached. She manages to ground the emotional beats even when the script forces her into absurdly melodramatic flashbacks involving fallen comrades and grieving families at dinner tables set with untouched food. They have an easy, sharp-edged chemistry that occasionally sparks through the synthetic dialogue, though the film insists on interrupting their quietest moments with a brassy, over-orchestrated transition to the nearest mess hall. Anil Kapoor glowers from the control tower as Rocky, barking orders with an economy of movement that suggests he would rather be anywhere else, perhaps on the set of War where the stakes felt marginally more tethered to something human. Karan Singh Grover fills out the uniform well enough, marching through the background with a permanently worried expression that makes you wonder if he left his oven on back at the quarters.

The aerial sequences are loud, dizzying, and completely weightless, stitched together from digital assets that refuse to interact with the natural light of the sky in any convincing way. You miss the practical grit of something like Top Gun: Maverick, where every G-force grimace felt earned by the actual air pressure beating against a stunt pilot's face. Here, the camera swoops through canyons and around missile trails with the frictionless ease of a mouse cursor, rendering the dogfights into brightly colored abstract art where nothing ever gets dirty or smells like kerosene. Vishal-Shekhar's soundtrack hits the same notes over and over again, dropping the same pounding percussion track during every single instance where someone has to look intensely at a radar screen. It’s loud, it’s brassy, and by the third time the patriotic anthem swells over a slow-motion walk away from an explosion, you start wondering how long the runtime actually is.

Hindi cinema has always wrestled with the depiction of cross-border conflict, usually defaulting to broad strokes that cast geopolitical neighbors as mustache-twirling caricatures hiding in fortified bunkers. Fighter does little to challenge this tradition, inventing a generic terrorist organization that allows the characters to spout dialogue about secularism and duty without ever getting mud on their boots or engaging with the messy reality of actual diplomacy. The patriotic fervor feels manufactured in a boardroom, designed to hit specific emotional triggers during holiday release weekends rather than emerging organically from the characters' inner lives. When Patty gives a speech about what it means to wear the uniform, he sounds less like a seasoned fighter pilot and more like a middle manager reading an inspirational quote found on LinkedIn. It is all very clean, very earnest, and entirely weightless, floating above the ground on digital thrust that never quite manages to lift the dramatic stakes off the tarmac.

There is a sequence near the middle involving a roadside dhaba where the pilots eat parathas and joke about their romantic lives that works better than almost anything else in the picture, simply because it stops the relentless forward momentum long enough for people to breathe. Roshan and Padukone sit across a sticky plastic table and argue about flying styles, and for three minutes you forget about the impending missile strikes and the cardboard-cutout villains waiting in the third act. Then the music swells up from nowhere, someone starts dancing on a bench, and the illusion shatters back into the standard operating procedure of modern commercial Hindi films. It is hard to stay angry at a machine that runs this smoothly, even when its gears are squeaking and the pilot keeps looking at the camera instead of the horizon.