Razneesh Ghai’s sophomore feature, 120 Bahadur, unfolds as a daring historical chronicle of an Indian battalion confronting the overwhelming might of the Chinese army. To Ghai’s credit, the film sustains a steady tonal assurance throughout to create a thoughtful meditation on courage and the unseen toll of heroism.
During the 1962 Sino-Indian War, radio operator Ramchander Yadav (Sparsh Walia), the lone survivor of the Battle of Rezang La, lies in a military hospital, haunted by what he has lived through. As he recounts the past to a senior officer, the story turns to Charlie Company of the Kumaon Regiment, led by Major Shaitan Singh Bhati (Farhan Akhtar), who foresaw that the Chinese would strike through Rezang La. His warnings were dismissed, reinforcements denied, and the battalion was left to defend the icy frontier on its own. Singh’s prediction comes true and when the Chinese assault at Rezang La finally arrives, Shaitan Singh and his band of 120 soldiers make their stand against an army of thousands…
What stands out most in 120 Bahadur is its refusal to show reverence before the familiar machinery of patriotic spectacle. The film declines the usual jingoistic shortcuts, the chest-beating rhetoric, the swelling choruses of triumph, and instead locates bravery in something more exacting. It honestly traces how a small battalion faced an impossible battle, transforming their last resistance into an enduring testament of courage. Major Shaitan Singh’s entrance captures this beautifully. It sidesteps the industry’s default grammar of hero worship. No slow-motion strut, no engineered applause. But instead gives us a leader defined by perception. His authority emerges from the way he reads a landscape, anticipates a flanking line, or steadies his men with a gaze that feels more like strategy than swagger. When he speaks to his battalion, composed of Ahirs from Haryana and Rajasthan, the film avoids the seductive trap of turning caste ancestry into a rallying cry. Instead, Shaitan Singh invokes their history in the British Indian Army not as a claim to inherited superiority but as a reminder of grit and continuity, a lineage of endurance rather than entitlement.
The film’s evocation of camaraderie among the soldiers is one of its quiet triumphs. It is rendered with a tenderness that feels both palpable and rooted in the period. Rajiv G Menon’s screenplay and Sumit Arora’s dialogue sketch these men not as interchangeable figures in uniform but as individuals carrying small, luminous fragments of longing. One soldier, hopelessly smitten with Madhubala, pens her a letter with the earnestness of someone who still believes cinema can bridge worlds. Another dreams of becoming a singer, only to find his aspirations smothered by a father determined to funnel him into the Army, as if duty were the only inheritance worth passing down. There is also the new recruit denied a proper jacket at 18,000 feet because the supply line has thinned. Yet, amid these indignities, the bonds between the men take on a moving, almost luminous force. Together, they survive not only the brutal weather, but also the harsher brutality of the advancing Chinese troops. These fleeting vignettes create the emotional scaffolding of the film, binding us to the soldiers not through patriotic diktat but through the fragile textures of their everyday lives. And so, when the time comes for them to sacrifice their lives, they do not die as distant figures of legend. They die as one of us.
The first half of 120 Bahadur is devoted to acquainting us with the soldiers’ interior lives while outlining the geopolitical tension that made Rezang La so volatile while the second half plunges us into the thick of war. Ghai sketches, with brisk economy, how China rushed to seize the region before the ceasefire, driven partly by American pressure and partly by the cold arithmetic of a cartographic battle fought over territory. This context gives the battles that follow a political urgency, too. As the film shifts decisively into war, and the battle sequences attain a near-tactile immediacy. The action is visceral, and at times brutal, but never hollow. Even in close-quarters combat, every blow and retreat is anchored in strategy and the desperation of men running out of options. Each attack emerges as a character of its own, volatile, punishing, and propelled by Dada Kishan Ki Jai as its clarion call.
For a film mounted at this scale, and with such earnest intent, 120 Bahadur shows admirable resistance to the commercial pressures that typically shape Hindi war dramas. Yet it does not entirely escape them. The flashback involving Shaitan Singh and his wife, Shagun (Raashii Khanna), feels less like an organic extension of the narrative and more like an obligatory emotional detour. The song that introduces Shagun only heightens this impression. It arrives abruptly, as if checking a box rather than deepening the story. Similarly, the scenes of Shaitan Singh with his son before Diwali suffer from a certain hurried sentimentality. The climax, too, dips into familiar Bollywood shorthand. A brutal Chinese general pausing to acknowledge Shaitan Singh’s bravery feels like a gesture lifted from a more conventional template of wartime honour. Another moment, when a Chinese officer gets shot through Shaitan Singh’s clever ruse, leans into a kind of theatrics that sits uneasily beside the film’s otherwise grounded tone. These choices don’t derail the film, but they do remind us how firmly mainstream Hindi cinema’s impulses persist, even in works striving for sobriety and restraint.
Performance-wise, Farhan Akhtar brings a measured tone and a steely stillness to the role. His presence suggests a leader whose command lies in clarity and resolve, not in volume. Sparsh Walia brings an affecting mix of vulnerability and courage to his grounded performance and gives the film its emotional anchor. Vivan Bhatena offers a firm and reliable counterweight to Akhtar. Ajinkya Deo, too, leaves an authoritative impression, but Raashii Khanna is unfortunately confined to an ornamental role, given little space to do more than embody the film’s sentimental digressions. The supporting ensemble – Dhanveer Singh, Sahib Verma, Ashutosh Shukla, Atul Singh, Brijesh Karanwal, Devendra Ahirwar, and Digvijay Pratap among others – collectively sustains the film’s emotional fabric. Their performances, textured and unforced, render the battalion’s camaraderie both credible and deeply felt.
Tetsuo Nagata’s cinematography captures the jagged, unforgiving terrain of Ladakh, and later the stark, snow-laden expanse, with such crystalline clarity that the landscape becomes an integral character in its own right. Whether in sweeping aerial shots that convey the sheer scale of the advancing Chinese forces or in the jittered immediacy of handheld camerawork during close-quarter combat, Nagata’s images pull us directly into the war’s physical and psychological harshness. Rameshwar S Bhagat’s editing ushers us into the film’s rhythms from the very first sequence. Pranav Shukla’s sound design further deepens the atmosphere with the ricochet of gunfire, the howl of the wind at 18,000 feet, the muffled terror of approaching boots, all rendered with a realism that refuses embellishment. Satish Raghunathan’s background score complements this auditory landscape without overwhelming it. Amit Trivedi’s Yaad Aate Hain inevitably recalls Sandese Aate Hain from Border (1997), yet the song finds its own emotional register
Setting 120 Bahadur beside Haqeeqat (1964), easily India’s best war film till date, is an easy reflex, but ultimately a reductive one. Though both evoke Rezang La, they arise from different eras and cinematic traditions. 120 Bahadur stands firmly on its own as a film of muscular craft and clarity. It illuminates a historical battle long overshadowed and, in doing so, asserts itself as one of the strongest Hindi releases of the year.
Hindi, War, Drama, Color