Film Review: Hotel Mumbai (2019)

Hotel Mumbai has been called “gripping” and “harrowing,” and I suppose it is, but here are some other words: “exploitive,” “distasteful,” and “insensitive.” It’s one thing to tell the story of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks with gritty detail, it’s another thing altogether to tell it from a mostly rich and mostly white perspective. Nearly 170 people were killed over the course of the coordinated 4-day attack, but, with a few exceptions, we’re shown only the faces of the white victims. This approach cheapens the magnitude of the event and reduces the Indian victims (of which were the overwhelming majority) to mere numbers.

Although competently shot and edited, the reliance on and over-indulgence of gore creates scenes of macabre brutality rather than ones of sympathetic heroism. It’s difficult to put oneself into the shoes of a film’s protagonists when its tone is more akin to a slasher picture in which teenagers are stalked by supernatural serial killers rather than real-life terrorists. What we get is not much more than grisly death, narrow escape, repeat. Add to this the presence of an unseen puppet master known as “Brother Bull,” and the film staggers into James Bond-style villainy.

It isn’t that the story of the Mumbai attacks shouldn’t be told, it’s that it shouldn’t be told like this. The horror of those four days and the impact they had on a city, a nation, and a world deserve sympathy and understanding, not PTSD-inducing carnage. On a positive, except for Armie Hammer (who I admit I’ve never liked in anything), the cast does a fine job with the material they’re given – with Dev Patel and Anupam Kher being the stand-outs. Unfortunately, they are also the only Indian characters to receive any development whatsoever. The rest are cannon fodder, and that’s a shame.