Home Film Reviews Alpha Is A Catastrophic Failure. Anupama Chopra Praises It For Its ‘Badass...

Alpha Is A Catastrophic Failure. Anupama Chopra Praises It For Its ‘Badass Women’ & ‘Kinetic Action’

By
The Commune
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anupama chopra alpha

Alpha is a catastrophically bad film, but the bigger question is, has Anupama Chopra judged it like she judged Dhurandhar? The answer is NO.

Alpha is a film that fails at everything. Half a star for the film is too generous. Alpha is easily one of the weakest films to come out of the YRF Spy Universe. It has expensive visuals, polished action sequences and familiar franchise branding, but none of that can hide the biggest problem – the film simply doesn’t work.

A rogue Indian Army officer secretly continues a super-soldier programme after the government shuts it down. On paper, that could have become an engaging spy thriller. Instead, director Shiv Rawail turned it into another loud, empty YRF action film that mistakes explosions for storytelling, in short, a cringefest.

Alia Bhatt is completely miscast. She can fit in a romcom, well, to her credit, she did well in Udta Punjab, she might be a capable actress in the right kind of role, but an action film demands screen presence and physical credibility. Watching her puny self effortlessly beat up men twice her size never feels convincing. The problem isn’t that she’s a woman. The problem is that she simply doesn’t suit this role.

Sharvari is reduced to little more than a supporting prop. Bobby Deol gets a poorly written character and an accent that changes from Haryanvi to Rajasthani from scene to scene. Anil Kapoor looks like he wandered into this film from another film set. Hrithik Roshan’s cameo exists only to remind audiences that they once liked this portion of the ‘universe’.

The Story Makes Less Sense The Longer It Goes On

The writing is where Alpha completely falls apart. The film borrows heavily from Hollywood while forgetting to borrow the one thing that matters – believable storytelling.

Its biggest twist asks the audience to accept that a Pakistani operative could quietly spend decades inside the Indian military system. Instead of building that idea carefully, the film simply expects viewers to accept it because the screenplay says so.

That is where the comparison with Dhurandhar becomes impossible to avoid.

Dhurandhar also asked audiences to believe an extraordinary story – an Indian operative living undercover in Pakistan for twenty years. But the film spent time making that world believable. It earned the audience’s trust. Alpha does not.

It simply throws impossible situations on screen and expects expensive visuals to do the rest.

Anupama Chopra Tore Into Dhurandhar. Why Does Alpha Get A Softer Landing?

When Dhurandhar released, Anupama Chopra left very little room for ambiguity. She criticised the film’s hyper-masculinity, questioned its overt patriotism, and argued that its anti-Pakistan sentiment overwhelmed whatever story it was trying to tell. It was a review that left readers with no doubt about her verdict. Whether one agreed with her conclusions or not, she was unequivocal in her assessment that the film fundamentally did not work.

Months later, Alpha arrives carrying the weight of the YRF Spy Universe, a massive budget, a marquee cast, and the distinction of being the franchise’s first female-led film. Yet while Chopra’s latest review does point out several flaws, it is strikingly different in tone. She identifies the film’s problems but rarely allows those problems to define the film itself. Instead, she repeatedly returns to what the film was trying to achieve, the ambition behind it – the badass women, the kinetic action and inclusivity, and the potential it almost realised.

She Identifies Almost Every Problem… But Stops Short Of The Verdict

Ironically, Chopra’s own review acknowledges many of the same weaknesses.

She says that Alpha lacks enough cinematic highs to sustain interest. She says the story repeatedly stumbles. She criticises the old-fashioned plot twists, the clunky dialogue and the bafflingly poor decisions made by key characters. She points out that the film eventually abandons its more interesting emotional conflict in favour of another routine India-versus-Pakistan narrative. She even describes several scenes as unintentionally comical, including lengthy exposition sequences and familiar hostage clichés that feel straight out of 1980s commercial cinema.

Yet despite listing out one structural weakness after another, the overall tone of the review remains surprisingly forgiving. Rather than concluding that the film is fundamentally broken, Chopra continually redirects the discussion towards the film’s intentions. She praises its ambition, its ‘inclusivity’, its femininity. She celebrates its attempt to redefine the Hindi film heroine. She argues that the women fail not because they lack capability, but because the writing fails them.

Her review is too generous towards a film whose flaws she herself has painstakingly identified.

The Alia Bhatt Defence Continues

Perhaps the clearest example of this generosity lies in Chopra’s assessment of Alia Bhatt.

One of the most common criticisms levelled against Alpha has been that Bhatt simply does not convince as an action star. Action cinema demands more than acting ability. It demands physical credibility and screen presence. Throughout the film, viewers are repeatedly asked to believe that Bhatt can effortlessly overpower heavily built, professionally trained men in hand-to-hand combat. For many, those scenes never become believable.

Chopra acknowledges Bhatt’s petite frame but ultimately argues that she still makes the action work. The review therefore appears less interested in interrogating whether the casting succeeds than in defending the attempt itself.

The Audience Was Right All Along

Even before Alpha hit theatres, audiences had begun questioning the project. Alia Bhatt’s casting as an action lead attracted criticism after her Cannes appearance and later after the teaser. Others argued that the teaser itself looked generic and uninspired. Many viewers questioned whether Bhatt possessed the physicality required to convincingly headline an action franchise built around larger-than-life spy heroes.

Now that the film has released, many of the criticisms that were dismissed before release have become the dominant talking points among reviewers and audiences alike. The screenplay is weak. The emotional core never develops. The action lacks impact despite its scale. The lead performance remains divisive. The story collapses under increasingly implausible twists.

Different Films, Different Standards

In Dhurandhar, Anupama Chopra showed little patience for what she saw as the film’s ideological excesses. In Alpha, however, she identifies virtually every major storytelling failure – the weak screenplay, derivative ideas, clunky dialogue, implausible plotting and missed opportunities, yet repeatedly softens the impact of those criticisms by returning to the film’s ambition and intent. The review stops short of delivering the kind of unequivocal verdict that Dhurandhar received. If criticism is to mean anything, the standards cannot change depending on the film under review.

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