Bollywood sports biopics, enjoying a recent surge in interest, promise simple populist pleasures. These films, aspiring to be inspirational and patriotic, are content following a template. Their protagonist, a gifted sportsperson, usually belonging to a small town or village, fights different odds to play for India and, eventually, helps his country win major global tournaments. This set-up is held together by recurring elements: familial discord, intense training, hostile opponents. This is cinema by the numbers, and Shaad Ali’s Soorma, based on the life of Indian hockey player Sandeep Singh, has little interest in subverting the formula. The main difference, however, here is the motive: Sandeep (Diljit Dosanjh) wants to break into the Indian team because it will guarantee respectability and job, making him a suitable groom for his girlfriend, Harpreet (Tapsee Pannu), who is herself a hockey player.
But the player in the family is Sandeep’s elder brother, Bikramjeet (Angad Bedi), who, early in the film, comes home dejected as he fails to make it to the Indian hockey team. “Ab nahin hona India select (Now I won’t get a chance),” he tells Sandeep. But he soon notices that Sandeep has an ingenious talent for hitting drag flicks, and encourages him to hone his talents and play for the country.
What follows, in parts, is a largely jaded sports drama. Bikramjeet introduces Sandeep to the coach of the Indian team (Vijay Raaz), a character that seems planted in the film for the sake of laughs. Raaz, who has the funniest lines in the film, plays the part well, but his character, frequently striving for comedic effect, looks jarring in a film based on a true story. Raaz’s character, in fact, is one of the many trope-heavy elements in the movie.
Soorma doesn’t begin on a jingoistic note, but it soon gets there. A Pakistani team enters the picture, and you know what happens next. One of its players is presented as a quasi-villainous figure, threatening and colliding with Sandeep. The coach, likewise, is a uni-dimensional character, designed to stoke nationalistic feelings – plot points that looks like it’s straight out of Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, a sports biopic instrumental in lowering the bar for the genre. Then there are other scenes – such as the gruelling training sessions accompanied by a customary ‘inspirational’ song, a hockey federation official disapproving of Sandeep, Harpreet watching the match from the stadium – that remind us of many sports films, lacking in originality, bite and wit.
Even the central conflict – Sandeep getting accidentally shot, becoming paralysed, and staging a comeback – struggles to give the film a fresh perspective. Soorma, as a result, feels frequently dichotomous: a movie low on stakes that often lunges for melodrama. Yet amid obvious sloppiness, there are several scenes that take you by surprise. Dosanjh and Pannu share a wonderful chemistry, and their conversations are marked by hesitancy and awkwardness, framing a relationship almost always falling short.
Dosanjh, never short on charm, exudes credible and comforting old-world earnestness, a quality that has deserted Hindi film heroes. Even while playing the heroic lead in a mainstream film, Dosanjh’s Sandeep isn’t fixated on owning scenes; he’s as content slipping in the background, as he is being a regular Pind boy: flashing a disarming smile, cracking a silly joke, trying to impress his girlfriend.
At one point during the song ‘Good Man Di Laaltain’, Dosanjh and Pannu steal a moment from the crowd, go into a nearby gully and continue dancing – it’s not even a dance; it’s just two joyous actors doing their own thing. It’s not a scene that conveys any larger meanings – it just is – and yet its simplicity is endearing. You often feel that there was a much quieter, nicer, film tucked somewhere in Soorma. But the filmmaker, Ali, is so busy poring over the rulebook that he eventually forgets to look up.