Holiday: A Soldier Is Never Off Duty
Starring: Akshay Kumar, Sonakshi Sinha, Govinda, Sumeet Raghavan
Rated: 5.5/10
We all know that there are only two things that one can expect from a movie with Akki as the hero — either it will be a masala comedy film like Welcome, Housefull, Heera Pheri or an out and out action movie like Rowdy Rathore and the Khiladi series. Our munda has tried his hand at some zara hatke films like OMG-Oh My God! and Special 26, Akshay Kumar as we all know has not been wrongly nicknamed Khiladi Kumar.
So, one already knows what his character in the movie titled Holiday: A Soldier is Never off Duty will do. Is there actionIJ Definitely. Are the action sequences believableIJ Well, some of them are, if one had proper training. And our hero is a soldier in the Indian Army, in the Defense Intelligence Agency wing no less. Are there songsIJ One can’t have a commercial Hindi movie without a song and dance thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, these are rather badly timed.
In fact, one doesn’t need these breaks that AR Murugadoss insisted on. In a movie where the hero is chasing a terrorist out to destroy the entire nation, the one thing that is not needed is a song that puts the breaks on a fast moving car which suddenly finds a huge speed breaker in front.
And then there is the duration of the movie itself. What were producer Vipul Shah and Murugadoss thinking when they made a movie that is 189 minutes long! Gone are the days when the longer the movie, the better it was. Today, it has to be crisp, slick and needs to move at a fast pace.
Still, Holiday... manages to entertain. Akshay Kumar carries the entire movie on his shoulders. He fights, he sings, he catches the baddies, he acts like a buffoon in front of his boss, Govinda, he even endangers the life of his younger sister — for the ‘greater good of the country’ he says. While Sumeet Raghavan, the Mumbai cop watches his friend (Akshay Kumar) is on mission save Mumbai, Sonakshi Sinha does what she does — saunters in does a song and dance and then vanishes.
The movie has rather simplistic solution on how to counter terrorist’s attacks in the country may not sit well with some, but if you love a masala movie, go see this one.