Ground Zero movie review: Emraan Hashmi paramilitary film is a conflicting watch

Posted in Srinagar in 2001, NND Dubey led a two-year operation to eliminate Ghazi Baba, a Jaish terrorist and alleged mastermind of the 2001 Indian Parliament attack. They tracked him down to a safehouse in downtown Srinagar and stormed it at night. The ensuing gun battle lasted hours, and one of the officers, Balbir Singh, was killed in combat. In 2004, Dubey was awarded the Kriti Chakra, India’s second-highest peacetime gallantry award.

For its first 40 minutes or so, Ground Zero — directed by Tejas Prabha Vijay Deoskar and written by Sanchit Gupta and Priyadarshee Srivastava — resembles any other Hindi action film set in the Valley, with one difference: Pakistan is curiously absent from the picture. Focused on the BSF, the film largely concerns itself with questions of internal security. Dubey, in his introductory scene, engages militants at mid-range while also risking his life to save a child. It lays out his MO: tactical efficiency while preventing civilian harm. It is a rosy, idealised view of how paramilitary forces operate on ground—all those door-to-door searches and reprisal attacks, the chaos of crowd control at protest sites, a stray warning shot lodging in the neck of a fleeing youth.

When a young boy is injured by Dubey’s gun in Ground Zero, it’s all part of a plan. Husain (Mir Mehrooz) becomes his informant in the ‘pistol gang’, a local rebel group that has killed 70 jawans. Husain, a smiling, misguided youth who decides to give up the gun, sampling ‘halwa’ cooked by Dubey’s wife, is the film’s mascot of de-radicalisation. “We are not here to beat them but reform them,” Dubey tells his men. Lest our hero comes across as too naive and soft-hearted, the film appends a scene near the end, where he interrogates a suspect who tries appealing to his empathetic nature, swiftly calling the man’s bluff and shooting him in the leg.

The Pahalgam attack has raised serious questions on intelligence. It’s striking, then, that Ground Zero roots its procedural in street-level intel gathering. An early lead, which Dubey takes to Delhi, is brushed off by the IB chief. “Leave intelligence to us,” the man scoffs. Back in Srinagar, Dubey makes his breakthrough studying maps and radio codes — and through his keen knowledge of civic life. The film’s action set pieces are sporadic and functional—it’s miles behind the thumping choreography of Uri: The Surgical Strike.

Deoskar’s visual imagination of Kashmir is strictly limited; there are frames here that could have been imported, with a few button clicks, from other films. The dialogue writing is worse: a terrorist announcing, “aaj mauka bhi hai, dastoor bhi” is almost comically trite. The BSF jawans are Sikhs, Malayalis, Bengalis, Rajasthanis, yet none of the characters, save for Dubey, are particularly fleshed out. The posing of thorny questions about Kashmiri reality is reserved for the officers, in private; when a pack of reporters surrounds Dubey, his wife, played by Sai Tamhankar, tells them off.

In a film full of sudden attacks, the biggest curveball lobbed at the audience is this: Emraan Hashmi as a moral warrior. The actor, once known for playing smirking playboys and crooks, is a sharp, solid presence in Ground Zero, but perhaps his delicate underplaying was better suited for a less aggressive age. A belated line like “pehredaari bohut ho gayi, aab prahaar hoga (enough patrolling, now punishment)“is sheer genre lip-service. Hashmi shines in the greys.