Airlift

2016

2h 20m

History

Drama

Mystery & Thriller

List

85%

13 Reviews

Tomatometer

77%

500+ Ratings

Audience Score

Ranjit Katiyal, an Indian businessman, leads a happy and successful life in Kuwait with his family. However, when Iraq invades Kuwait, he decides to risk his life to save his stranded countrymen.

Read More

Read Less

arun s

I didn't like this film the first time I watched on theater. Ranjit Katyal was not the only man who saved the people, and lots of time happened in the background as well. The main plus of this film is that it feels it is directly speaking to you, which is not the case with many Bollywood films. i still feel this film had many overblown and unnecessary sequences but it is a decent watch. ill leave it at that.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

03/31/23

Full Review

Audience Member

One word for the movie "Masterpiece"

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

02/08/23

Full Review

yash b

"Airlift" is a rock solid thriller from Bollywood. What I liked about this movie is that it really kept me on the edge of my seat. I felt that at any moment the stakes were high and anything could happen. When something dangerous happens to any of the characters, I genuinely felt the breakneck intensity. I do feel the movie does go back in forth in terms of pacing but for the most part, it was solid entertainment. It's not a conventional Bollywood movie, but it works for the story it trying to tell.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

03/31/23

Full Review

Audience Member

This is a substandard version of hotel rwanda(2004) with no continuation at all. Marketing of this movie was the best part and foolish people went to see the movie and felt as if they became nationalists after watching a wrong depiction of a historic moment in india's history. You might feel no involvement in the storyline and events being portrayed. Some of the best actors given some scenes that were not really required just to increase their screen presence with some shitty dialogue, speech or emotion. It is the most over hyped crap that should had been better.

Rated 1 out of 5 stars

01/30/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Airlift is a Bollywood flick from 2016 that is based on a true story about over 170,000 Indians that had to flee Kuwait at the time of the 1990 Iraq invasion and war. This tells the story about how one man managed to save them all and bring them back to the safety of India. This was an epic movie and well done. It is two hours long and does take some time to get through but totally worth it. What gets to me is we watch these kinds of movies and it shows us how we are the same and no matter where we come from our backgrounds our religious beliefs why can we still not see each other as one family. Why does it take tragedy or war for us to wake up to see that we are all part of one human race. Watch the movie and hopefully you will be touched by a powerful true story about what humanity is capable of from both sides.

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

02/08/23

Full Review

Audience Member

The first thing you notice about Airlift is that Akshay Kumar no longer plays the role of a buffoon. His career has always been a study in contrasts - from juvenile mediocrity like Housefull to hard-hitting, edge-of-the-seat drama like Special 26, no actor in Bollywood has entertained (and disappointed) us quite as frequently as Akshay has. As Ranjit Katyal, a wealthy businessman who dons the hat of saviour during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, however, Akshay delivers a career-best performance. Director Raja Krishna Menon's new film throws the Middle Eastern crisis of 1990 and the geopolitical dynamics that surround it into sharp relief, following a narrative template that largely mimics that of Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning masterpiece, "Argo". Shops are ransacked, proud skyscrapers are razed to the ground and innocent citizens are ruthlessly murdered in cold blood, and all these take place in broad daylight. Predictable, it falls to our hero to orchestrate what turns out to be the largest civilian evacuation in modern-day history. While the storyline and its execution is predictably routine, where Airlift succeeds is in creating a claustrophic, nerve-racking atmosphere that will leave you gasping on the edge of your seat. The acting is uniformly good throughout the film, save for Inaamul Haq's ridiculously over-the-top performance as an Iraqi war general that wouldn't have seemed so out of place in a B-grade Sajid Khan comedy. His pseudo-Arabic accent gets on your nerves every single time he appears on the screen and is by far the film's biggest weakness. Menon also needlessly injects random songs into the screenplay that not only disrupt the film's narrative flow but also amply demonstrate the need for greater subtlety in Indian filmmaking. Akshay's terrific performance, however, makes up for many of this film's weaknesses. Airlift is a film that attempts to reach stratospheric levels of perfection. As things stand, though, it just about manages to take off, and that it does well.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

02/06/23

Full Review

Read all reviews

Post a rating

Raja Krishna Menon

Director

Akshay Kumar

Vinod Singh Bartwal

Nimrat Kaur

Amrita Katyal

Inaamulhaq

Iraqi Major

Avtar Gill

Amrit Pal

Feryna Wazheir

Tasneem

Show Less Cast & Crew

Show More Cast & Crew

45%

%

Indu Sarkar

91%

87%

Bridge of Spies

TRAILER

for Bridge of Spies

89%

62%

Wife of a Spy

TRAILER

for Wife of a Spy

24%

37%

7 Days in Entebbe

TRAILER

for 7 Days in Entebbe

78%

77%

Black '47

TRAILER

for Black '47

Discover more movies and TV shows.

View More

View more photos

Namrata Joshi

The Hindu

Valid questions perhaps that come riding on jingoism, all wrapped up in the tricolour. Airlift would have been a better film without this nationalistic bluster but has a bigger potential at the box office now with the Republic Day just round the corner.

Jan 2, 2019

Full Review

Anil Sinanan

Time Out

'Bollywood' and 'realism' may not go hand in hand, but this is a worthy and largely successful attempt at meaningful commercial Hindi cinema.

Rated: 4/5

Oct 23, 2017

Full Review

Anupama Chopra

Hindustan Times

If nothing else, see it to see what Akshay Kumar can do.

Rated: 3.5/5

Jan 4, 2017

Full Review

Anushka Halve

Film Companion

Like Mission Raniganj, Airlift, too, sheds light on a significant historical event that may not be widely known.

Dec 12, 2023

Full Review

Rahul Desai

CatchNews

It's one thing to identify these numbers. It's another to give these digits a human face - complete with a beating heart, and a language that everyone can understand.

Rated: 3.5/5

Feb 7, 2019

Full Review

Srijana Mitra Das

The Times of India

Airlift features Akshay at his best -- based on real-life characters, there's little khiladi-wala swag in Akshay's performance and more mature control.

Rated: 4/5

Oct 30, 2017

Full Review

Read all reviews

Synopsis

Ranjit Katiyal, an Indian businessman, leads a happy and successful life in Kuwait with his family. However, when Iraq invades Kuwait, he decides to risk his life to save his stranded countrymen.

Director: Raja Krishna Menon
Screenwriter: Raja Krishna Menon, Suresh Nair, Ritesh Shah, Rahul Nangia
Production Co: T-Series, Cape of Good Films, Emmay Entertainment, Abundantia Entertainment, Viacom 18 Motion Pictures
Genre: History, Drama, Mystery & Thriller
Original Language: Hindi
Release Date (Streaming): Jan 23, 2017
Box Office (Gross USA): $2.1M
Runtime: 2h 20m

Most Popular at Home Now