Movie Review : Hotel Mumbai

Like ‘United 93’, ‘Hotel Mumbai ‘ begins from uncomfortable premise of turning an actual terrorist incident into material for dramatized suspense feature. 10 men unleaded gunfire and grenade assault across city of Mumbai killing more than 150 people. Last time there was a documentary, ‘Surviving Mumbai’, probably the movie is inspired by it. The characters many of them are composites, are guests and staff of Hotel Taj, one of the two top hotels terrorists targeted, and where more than 30 died during seize.

Story goes like : 

An affluent couple played by Nazmi Boinadi and Arnie Hammer leave their new born with the nanny ( played by Tulsa CobhamHarvey) to enjoy dinner date in the hotel restaurant. A high rolling Russian (Jason Issac) plans to spend the evening cavorting with local escort. 

The heroic hotel employees that include head chef ( played by Anupam Kher) and waiter ( Dev Patel) who shows up to work that day without proper footwear but begs to stay, needing the shift. That one moment of peace, before all the blood, occurs in the opening moments. A group of ten or so young terrorists — boys in ragged clothes — drift on a small vessel toward Mumbai, a metropolis shrouded in an amber haze. They're listening to instructions from a Brother Bull, an insidious terrorist mastermind dispatching instructions over the phone. The film's remaining two hours curdle into a uniquely 21st-century horror movie, with terrorists as the villains, rapid-fire guns as the weapons, and cell phone batteries as the lifeline to loved ones. 

 I vividly recollect the old timeline of the attack as my office was not far away from hotel; the smoke billowing from the hotel, the survivors clamoring through broken windows to escape to the ground, several floors below. 

The movie undertakes to present, in excruciating detail, the day's violence.

The Director Anthony recreated Taj Hotel in Adelaide and Mumbai to shoot. He interweaves the threads with precision and clarity conveying an impressive sense of hotel layout, the confusion of the circumstances and the visceral fear of hiding from the gunman. It reduces the randomness of real life bloodshed to the slick thrills of a pop corn movie.