State Of Siege: Temple Attack' is a wasted opportunity

State Of Siege: Temple Attack (film on Zee5); Cast: Akshaye Khanna, Parvin Dabas, Samir Soni, Gautam Rode, Abhimanyu Singh; Direction: Ken Ghosh; Rating: * * (two stars)

BY VINAYAK CHAKRAVORTY

The problem with "State Of Siege: Temple Attack" is the film simply cannot rise above hackneyed mediocrity.

This could have been a top-class thriller drawing from one of the most sordid chapters of contemporary Indian socio-political history. Instead, the film prefers banking on Bollywood cliches. It becomes a dull showcase of formula about soldiers killing terrorists in a flat, unimaginative plot stuck in a time warp.

"Temple Attack" is based on the Akshardham siege of 2002, although the narrative changes quite a lot of the actual characters, names and even incidents. On September 24 in 2002, armed men entered the Swaminarayan Akshardham complex at Gandhinagar, Gujarat, and launched an onslaught killing around 30 people and injuring over 80. National Security Guard (NSG) commandos stepped in to end the siege.

Writers William Borthwick and Simon Fantauzzo use that broad outline to set up a fictional screenplay that reveals no intention of understanding or exploring what actually happened. Not much research has clearly gone into the project, and writer-director Ken Ghosh fails to give the narrative any quality that would let the film resonate in one's mind. Not a single sequence is outstanding or original enough to stay with you.