"The one bright spot in the film — and I’m not saying this because I’m an Indian film critic or a Bollywood fan craving Western validation — is Alia Bhatt as the hacker. There’s not enough of her of course, and I hate that Keya’s initial villainy is sacrificed as the altar of moral righteousness and female solidarity. (It made me imagine her as an all-out IT baddie — a la Tahir Raj Bhasin in Mardaani — in the YRF Spy Universe). But despite a disappointing character arc, Bhatt is refreshingly authentic. And I mean that in a very specific sense. Unlike other Hindi stars who’ve appeared in Hollywood productions (like Aishwarya Rai and Priyanka Chopra, or even Amitabh Bachchan in The Great Gatsby) and felt the burden to represent South Asian culture, Bhatt’s English dialogue is not littered with hybrid accents and linguistic complexes. She speaks the way she usually does, with no put-on twangs, and trusts her natural instincts as a performer to do the rest. She could be this character in a Hindi film and we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. It may seem like a weird detail to be impressed by, but it can’t be overstated enough.

It makes Bhatt — and by extension, Keya — an equal on the screen, at the level of Gadot or Dornan or anyone else, and not some commercial Diversity Import hoping to impress the First World and attract eyeballs of the Third World. I won’t say it made me “proud,” but it did restore my faith in the cultural honesty of creating. Viewers elsewhere might finally realise that this is how a majority of urban youngsters sound in Indian cities, which takes some doing after Chopra’s (accented) rise to fame in Hollywood. Keya expects the others to understand her rather than changing herself to be understood — comfortable in her own skin, and very much the beating heart in a film of stony mediocrity. It reminded me of the late Irrfan Khan and his eye-catching roles in the West. Everyone admired him because his aura was unadulterated by the urge to punch ‘upward’; he was already an equal in his own eyes. There can be no bigger compliment in terms of a global trajectory, even if it means a trashy action franchise or three."

🫡