Batla House

 Batla House is based on the Batla House Encounter which took place on 19^th Sep 2009, in the Jamia Nagar area of New Delhi. In this particular encounter, members of the terrorist group, Indian Mujahideen (IM) were killed and arrested by the Delhi Police after getting intelligence reports of the presence of terrorists responsible for the bomb blasts that occurred in Delhi a few days back in the area.

Tactically released on the nation’s independence day, the film has gained significant attention attracting a good crowd at the cinemas. The experience was that of a documentary specially made for the independence day, to be shown on a national channel to evoke a sense of patriotism and nationalism. It definitely has not gone down well as a commercial film but the impact can’t be felt because, like I said, it was released on the independence day. Or maybe that’s what the makers had in their mind. That only makes it worse because it falls in neither of the categories. The narrative is very poor and patchy. The entire film actually plays out in the final half hour or so. Most of the film focuses or tries to focus on the public outrage and false accusations that the officers had to face after the encounter.

This story has so many layers of a complex democratic system involving religion, media and popular politics playing out in a very serious matter of terrorism. It goes to show how complicated the judicial procedure is and how difficult it is for justice to prevail. A lot could have been done with a story like that but the inadequate script writing and story-telling make the entire effort passionless and redundant.

An already emotionless and static John Abraham is seen to be more so as he fails to emote the emotions of the police officer fighting hard for his country suffering from terror attacks. The rest of the characters lack seriousness and purpose. But yes, I felt that it was the national Independence day and that made the film somewhat enjoyable.

Rating – 3 / 5