Runway 34 movie review: Devgn plays Devgn and Bachchan plays Bachchan in a largely bland, briefly suspenseful thriller

Language: Hindi 

Runway 34, the new Hindi film directed by Ajay Devgn, is inspired by true events, as the trailer has already informed us. 

It’s an aviation thriller split into two halves. The first focuses on Devgn’s Captain Vikrant Khanna, an airline pilot, and an episode that could have led to tragedy when he landed a flight in Thiruvananthapuram with zero visibility in poor weather. Bachchan enters the picture in the second half as Narayan Vedant, an investigator probing what caused this near-disaster.

The segment devoted entirely to Vikrant and his co-pilot, Tanya Albuquerque, in the cockpit and the minutes leading up to the landing are well-directed. The production design, the deft editing and the back and forth between the two primary characters keeps this portion of the narrative consistently engaging.

Outside the cockpit though, Runway 34 is marked by generic storytelling, casualness towards its own content and loose ends staring in the face of even a non-expert. 

Devgn plays Devgn, which is fair enough since he seems comfortable in the role of a pilot with swag in his bearing and a touch of arrogance in his self-confidence. Bachchan plays Bachchan.

The confrontations between Vikrant and Narayan are curiously unexciting, though they are, surprisingly, occasionally humorous, minus the bombast that might have found its way into more formulaic Bollywood fare.

That said, we are not allowed to forget that Narayan is played by the Bachchan. The character is given a quirk to fit the veteran’s star image – a tendency to use a high-flown vocabulary that most people do not understand. Veere Di Wedding taught the masses the Hindi word for “orgasm”, Runway 34 should do the same for “home sickness” and “ostrich”. 

The performance to write home about comes from Rakul Preet Singh who brings an endearing youthful tremulousness to Tanya’s blend of admiration for her senior colleague and confusion about his behaviour at work, including a fleeting moment of trivialisation aimed at her, her continuing loyalty towards him and her innate honesty. She is respectful but stops short of being an obsequious fangirl, in a profession rarely assigned to women in Hindi cinema.

In fact, of the three, Tanya is the only one written in a well-rounded and convincing fashion. On the other hand, while portraying Vikrant as a minor jerk, the writing team still holds back on that aspect of his character, possibly to avoid making him too much less than the superhero that a conventional Hindi film hero still tends to be.

One way they do that is by leaving at least one question about Vikrant’s in-flight decisions unanswered despite the claim made repeatedly that Narayan is a meticulous, formidable sleuth.

Devgn as a director by and large does not try to melodramatise the proceedings beyond the melodrama intrinsic to his storyline, though a scene added to raise Vikrant’s emotional involvement in his near-death flight experience left me wondering which airline releases its pilots’ cellphone numbers to passengers. Runway 34 is not over-dramatic, but it is not dramatic enough either. 

What keeps Runway 34 flat despite the arresting in-flight crisis is the failure of the writers to inject tension into Narayan’s investigation or to give the storytelling and characters any depth – depth of the sort that might perhaps have come from some degree of cultural awareness?

For instance, the action moves between Dubai, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram and Mumbai, and a viewer must gather that shifts have been made from conversations and not from a changing socio-cultural or geographical landscape. 

Every place in Runway 34 looks antiseptic, like it could be anywhere in the world, or that it was generated on a computer. The broad brush strokes in the writing and art design outside the plane also have the effect of making the timeline of the tests conducted on Khanna and the initial interrogation a tad bit confusing.

Meanwhile, everyone everywhere in Runway 34 speaks Hindi or Hindi+English, except for one character who breaks into Malayalam at one point and speaks it with such a terrible accent and pronunciation that you know he is an actor who learnt the lines by rote. I am willing to accept that a Hindi film might want a viewer to suspend disbelief and to assume that characters have been assigned Hindi lines just to make the film easier on a traditional Hindi film viewer, but it is also worth noting that Indian cinema in languages other than Hindi routinely features characters speaking in Hindi and other languages to indicate the heterogeneity in their social milieu. Diversity can make all the difference between bland and richly detailed cinema.

One of the most high-profile films on an aircraft in recent years was the Tom Hanks-starrer Sully (2016), which, though far from perfect, managed to hold attention throughout precisely because of the colour it painted into the theatre playing out both inside and outside the leading man’s aircraft. Hindi cinema itself recently did a brilliant job of the hijack saga Neerja (2016) by making its protagonist and its settings so relatable that it ended up being not just a thriller but a very human story. When Runway 34 was inside that cockpit with Vikrant and Tanya, my breath briefly stopped for them, but prior to that pivotal passage and thereafter, I felt detached from the proceedings despite my curiosity over where the investigation would lead us. Runway 34 is unmemorable because it lacks a sense of urgency even while recounting a life-and-death story. 

Rating: 2.5 (out of 5 stars) 

Runway 34 is now in theatres

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial 

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by Anna MM Vetticad