Heroes emerge from the ranks of ‘Hotel Mumbai’ staff
IN MANY ways, Hotel Mumbai feels like The Towering Inferno for the new millennium: an oldfashioned disaster flick, set in what one character calls a “crazy elegant” hotel - except here the conflagration is set off not by an electrical defect, but by the flames of geopolitical division.
It’s also, more or less, a true story, with a gripping - at times, almost too gripping - screenplay by director Anthony Maras and John Collee, who based their fictionalised telling of the events on the Emmy-nominated documentary “Surviving Mumbai.”
The new movie concerns the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, in which militants from Pakistan laid siege to several sites in India’s largest city, including the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, where most of the film takes place. In the film, the attackers - members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba Islamist militia - are never identified, yet there’s no lingering mystery about their anti-India sentiments.
Indians will be the primary targets, along with moneyed Westerners, whose prominence the terrorists hope to use to draw attention to their cause.
For the purposes of the story, a single couple embodies this central conflict, and one of its contradictions: David (Armie Hammer) and his wife, Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi), an affluent young couple with a new baby and a nanny (Tilda CobhamHervey). They become, at least for a while, the story’s seeming protagonists, even when the terrorists realise that Zahra is Muslim. Her recitation of the Koran doesn’t soften their hearts - or stop them. Not much does. For a good long time, Hotel Mumbai is a tick-tock of horrific violence, which began in the city’s main train station and shifted to the hotel when the Taj opened its doors to fleeing victims (and attackers who blended in with them). It’s disturbing, to put it mildly, to watch them move through the building, killing people (often graphically) like they are swatting flies, and only stopping to snack on leftover food from a restaurant bus cart.
The callousness with which the terrorists operate is palpable and conveyed with a degree of verisimilitude that borders on sadism. “Hotel Mumbai” is a clockwork thriller, but man, is it hard to watch.