Runway 34 Movie Review: Devgn’s best directorial

A still from the film

Runway 34
U/A: Drama, mystery
Dir: Ajay Devgn
Cast: Ajay Devgn, Amitabh Bachchan
Rating: 3/5

There's a lovely looking, bearded, grand old actor Habib Bhai from Hyderabad - who I bump into at Bombay bars, on occasion - playing a journalist on a flight in this film. Wherein the plane is getting rerouted, because of turbulent weather.

Of all the beats in the world, he is an aviation reporter! And can instantly tell that the plane about to land in Trivandrum, instead of Cochin, is bad news. Because bad weather in Cochin should mean something similar in nearby Trivandrum as well, no?

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Such foresight! Only the main pilot in this pic (Ajay Devgn), who also personally makes "kursi ki peti" announcements, should know better.

Who else are on this plane? Bunch of weirdos and dumbasses, really - including an Indira Gandhi lookalike in the front row. Between them you feel, maybe, a world without this lot wouldn't be such a tragic loss after all.

Runway 34 is essentially an aviation movie. The only genuine one of the sub-genre in Hindi that I've seen. Not in the sense of a hijack drama that, say, the kinda crappy Zameen (2003), also starring Devgn, was.

It's apparently based on a 2015 Jet Airways Doha-Cochin (DOH-COK) flight that had a narrow escape due to landing, weather, and visibility issues. As does the fictional Skyline Airways flight, going from Dubai to Cochin, in this film.

A crash is averted alright. Landing isn't smooth, surely - with passengers cushioning their heads on the seats in front of them, and the plane nearing jagged edge of a cliff that is right ahead of the runway. No injuries that you can see, let alone deaths on board. What's the conflict/issue/problem then?

Well, to look into whether the main pilot, or the captain on the flight, took the right call after all. More important, whether this Davidoff-smoking party-animal, who was guzzling shots after shots on the night before his flight, was mentally in a fit condition - or even suffering from ‘homesickness syndrome' - to be able to
command a plane.

Why's this a decently made movie then? As you can tell, plot and scenes wise, there isn't enough material to keep you going for as long as the film does. For locations, there are primarily two. The first half is pretty much inside a plane. The second half is effectively a court-room drama.

The movie keeps you glued to the screen still - chiefly drawing out two phenomenal performers post-interval, when the competently executed air-turbulence drama is already over. That's Amitabh Bachchan as the feisty chief investigator, somewhat reprising his role from Pink (2016), looking into what went on inside the aircraft.

And Boman Irani, kinda channeling Vijay Mallya, as an airline owner - in quite the same way that he so wonderfully pulled off the late sexologist Mahinder Watsa in the slightly underrated Made In China (2019), more recently. There's Devgn in the front, right, left and centre, of course.

He's also directed and produced this film, with fairly first-rate work that's gone into the VFX, surely from his own company. Of all the indefatigable, long-standing superstars of his/'90s vintage, Devgn is the lone one, who's had career of sorts as a director alongside. Putting his name on the credit, unlike stars of yore, who used to hide behind ghost-directing their pictures instead.

This is his third film as director. The last one was Shivaay (2016) - with the hero and heroine dangling inside a tent on an ice cliff, and instead of freaking the hell out, making love over the superb track, Darkhast. Evidently I didn't walk in here with sky-high expectations. Needless to add, this is Devgn's best work as director.
His debut was part Iris (2001), part The Notebook (2004), called U Me Aur Hum (2008). What's the inspiration behind Runway 34? Having speed-watched two movies on Netflix before getting to this page, no doubt in my mind, the flight path neatly leads to Robert Zemekis's Flight (2012), and Clint
Eastwood's Sully (2016).

Both are aviation pictures, about the "human factor", with flight simulators and government regulators into the mix. They also explain what looks like a stately American emblem on the wall, the jury on their cushy seats, and a large courtroom with plush interiors, where the drama takes place here.

Honestly it's fun to get into the insides of how planes fly, between the captain, crew, air traffic controllers, and the runway. I'd love to hear a proper pilot pick holes in this plot. But that's not the point. The stated one about this story of courage under fire is quite clear: "Between what happened (kya hua), and how it did (kaise hua), lies the truth."

It's the aviation journalist, who says something that I'm still scratching my head over: "Mausam aur insaan, dono galti karte hain (Both humans and weather make mistakes). That's recipe for disaster!" Kya baat hai, Habib Bhai!