Real-life retired Gurkha Ritesh Chams adds authenticity in the lead role, but the script brims with cliches and sentimentality This tale of heroism and comrades in arms is getting a release in the UK to celebrate the legendarily fearless Gurkha soldier…
Real-life retired Gurkha Ritesh Chams adds authenticity in the lead role, but the script brims with cliches and sentimentality
This tale of heroism and comrades in arms is getting a release in the UK to celebrate the legendarily fearless Gurkha soldiers from Nepal and north-east India, who have been closely allied with the British army. Indeed, lead actor Ritesh Chams is a real-life retired Gurkha who fought and was wounded in Afghanistan, which adds a tang of authenticity to his performance, as it does with several other of the cast who are also former soldiers. That said, director Milan Chams’s script, co-written with Giriraj Ghimire, is chock full of cliches and cornball sentimentality – which will possibly make this reassuringly familiar for its intended audience.
The opening framing has an elderly man in the present day laying flowers on 11 November at a mountaintop monument, paying his respects to ancestors and fallen soldiers. He explains to his grandchild that he’s there to honour those who fought “gallantly and died in the world wars”. That may be a badly translated subtitle or a bit of misdirection, because the conflict we see the younger version of this old man fighting is in fact the Malayan Emergency of 1948-60 in which the Gurkhas fought alongside British soldiers against communist pro-independence insurgents – a whole other ball of wax.
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