The Vaccine War review: Nana Patekar is terrific in a film that is nearly undone by a laborious third act

In The Vaccine War, Nana Patekar’s headline act, minimalistic in its geometry but all-encompassing in its impact, holds the frame, even from the corner of a room. (Screen grab/YouTube/PEN Movies)

“Hum process ke hisaab se war ladenge, yaa war ke hisaab se process banayenge,” Bhargava, the Director-General of ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research), asks in a rousing scene from The Vaccine War. It’s a war cry tautly masquerading as a scientific query that asks, in the absence of precedence, would the process matter or would the result? Delivered by the film’s unsentimental anchor, it perfectly encapsulates the dilemma at the heart of a film that is, perhaps, too assured of its opinion on the matter. The Vaccine War is a straightforward underdog story, divided into 12 interconnected chapters that are quite simply fragments of a whole. Based on Balram Bhargava’s book Going Viral, it tells the story of Covaxin, India’s first indigenous and much-scrutinized Covid vaccine, developed on a war footing during the dreary days of pandemic. Fronted by a terrific Nana Patekar, a laborious third act notwithstanding, The Vaccine War is an enthralling if wildly aphoristic chronicle of the silent war our scientists waged against an unrelenting enemy.

The story begins with the initial days of the pandemic. ICMR, led by the plainspoken truisms of Bhargava, is warming up to images and stories leaking out of China. Things gather pace as a distant warning becomes an intimate threat. Scientists of ICMR, led by the blunt, at times overbearing, Bhargava are called into fervent action. “This is war,” he repeatedly declares, but without the teary-eyed sentiment of a war film. There is a metallic quality to Patekar’s performance, a rigidity born at least seemingly, out of scientific rigour. It’s unemotional, maybe even irksome in a satisfying way. Bhargava is assisted by a team of scientists, led by Pallavi Joshi, Girija Oak and a host of other female characters. The ensemble has the look of an Akshay Kumar film but does better by way of a stirring central performance.

The film juggles back and forth between its aspirations and the costs they come at. Women leave families, men toil in the far-off jungles, as the complex journey of exacting a vaccine is laid out in all its unflattering glory. But while the scientists put their lives, their familial obligations on the line, the Indian media, represented here by Raima Sen’s provocateur, casts doubt and aspersions where confidence was needed. As part of its anti-colonial stance, the media is painted as the villain in this ‘make in India’ story gearing the country towards a sense of self-sustenance and ‘atmanirbharta’. It’s this very media that the team of scientists ultimately exposes in an unconvincing, and maybe unnecessary third act. Up until that point the make-believe rigour, the cumbersomeness, even the scientific babble conjures a sense of authenticity. Things, however, become awkward when the film pointedly tries to dispense its own accusations and beliefs.

Directed by Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, The Vaccine War is the dramatization a contentious chapter in India’s war against Covid-19. It declares more than it debates and argues more than it illustrates. That said, it doesn’t shy away from the carnage of the second wave, the unprecedented loss of life and the precipice from where all hope, at one point, seemed to have taken a suicidal leap of hopelessness. In those trying times, in the middle of challenges personal and professional, a few scientists somehow kept going. If not for their accuracy, maybe this film is worth their incorruptible sentiment. It’s in the fictionalization of that emotion, the recreation of their distress that Agnihotri’s film soars. If women can trade family for work, men trade rest for duty, maybe we can trade doubt for courage or confidence, the film urges. It’s exhilarating, until it starts to whistle its own theories of sabotage and scandal.

The performances are commendable, including an excellent cameo by Anupam Kher. It’s, however, Patekar’s headline act, minimalistic in its geometry but all-encompassing in its impact, holds the frame, even from the corner of a room. To millions of Indians writhing in pain, he is the unvarnished but necessary image of truth. True to the motto of the mission he has undertaken, the actor under-promises but overdelivers. It rarely feels like acting, the sight of an ageing man driving his colleagues against the wall, in a matter-of-fact tone so rude, it practically drowns any scope for contemplative softness. “Karna hai toh karna hai,” Bhargava tells his boss, every time he is asked to do the unthinkable. But then in times of war, can you really?

The biggest problem with The Vaccine War is Agnihotri’s desire to model it to a statement rather than an inquiry. The arguments are decidedly cheery, the motivations a bit too facile. Even in the face of a worthy antagonist – a deadly invisible virus – the director can’t help but flesh the people he intends to speak down to. The media has rarely been part of the solution, but in a film provincially dealing with diligence and dignity, maybe the science, its authentic labour could have sufficed. Rather than just tell that underdog story, expand on its complexity, The Vaccine War tries to victimize Indian scientists, as the people who are wronged every time someone demands accountability. It’s neither the place, nor the argument befitting of a relevant film. And yet it is watchable for the sincerity of that unlikely conquest alone.