When Akshay Kumar Spoke About Being In The Holiday Mode News24 –

The potent Akshay Kumar-Vipul Shah team is back with its most lethal entertainer to date. Holiday is a fast-paced, exhilarating roller coaster ride filled with the most unexpected twists and turns. The anxious narrative is nourished by some spot-on background music which punctuates and pins down the heart-stopping action. A. Natarajan Subramaniam’s cinematography takes the edgy proceedings to another level altogether. The fidgety images are framed traditionally in every shot, and yet they are able to furnish a renewed vigour to the goings-on.
In the Vipul Shah produced Holiday, director Murugadoss manages to mix the dark theme of terrorism with a palatable mainstream cinematic thaali served with dollops of pickles and papad and is a marvel. The director’s earlier film Ghajini was another landmark of mainstream filmmaking. It suffered from excessive violence and too many resemblances to a Hollywood film (Memento) to be dismissed as coincidental.

In Holiday Murugadoss is more in charge of the proceedings. Having Akshay Kumar at the helm helps. He is a man off the streets and yet capable of looking completely convincing as a larger than life hero. This is Akshay’s most chiseled and restrained yet boisterous and exuberant performance to date. It’s just as hard to imagine Holiday without Akshay as it is to imagine last week’s elegiac and thoughtful Citylights without Rajkummar Rao. They both breathe life into their characters from different respiratory systems.
We often tend to think the grammar and language of mainstream cinema to be far easier to convey than the language of the so-called ‘serious’ cinema Wrong! A full-on massy product which doesn’t resort to outlandish inanities or outright vulgarity is the most difficult form of filmmaking. In Holiday Murugadoss has some absolutely unflinching support from his writers and technicians, all out to create that increasingly elusive cinematic entity.
Holiday is not without its flaws. What would life in the movies be without those? Sonakshi Sinha’s role and presence in the plot can at best be termed as comic relief. It is interesting to see how the director weaves the romantic (read: glamorous) element into what is predominantly a rugged man-to-man pow-wow between an army-man on leave and a super-intelligent terrorist who is seen to work out not from a dingy warehouse but a normal home teeming with the scents and images of domestic harmony.
Full marks to the film’s art and costumes designer. Apart from Sonakshi everyone looks at home.
The irony of terror in the climate of normalcy is chilling. And it’s a master-stroke to cast the unknown Freddy Daruwala as the terrorist mastermind. Daruwala looks and behaves like a hi-tech executive in a multi-national rather than a diabolic terrorist. It’s in the flashes of arrogant megalomania or his chilling cold-blooded laughter that we see the devilish man behind the white collar mask.
Daruwala is quite the discovery .As is the tradition in Good Versus Evil sagas, Akshay and Freddy don’t come face-to-face until the finale. When they do….boom! Boy oh boy, the climactic one-to-one fistfight between Akshay and Daruwala is so heart-in-the-mouth audiences will forget to breathe for a good 15 minutes.
This film rarely gives you time to come up for air. Holiday is that rare masala entertainer which leaves you breathless with excitement. The writing is so skilled and the interweavement of the terrorist theme into the larger plot of an army man’s vacation gone awry is so astute, that you end up excusing and overlooking the excesses. Govinda, for one, as Akshay’s numb-skulled superior is completely out of place. You wish Govinda and Sonakshi’s annoying characters would be expelled from the storytelling by some computer-generated magic.
The ever-dependable Sumeet Raghavan as Akshay’s pal and colleague in counter-terrorism is able to make a much better place for himself. But it’s the Akshay-Daruwala conflict that keeps you riveted for nearly three hours of this pitch-perfect film’s playing-time.
Some episodes such as the one where Akshay’s character collects his army pals at a church wedding for a “game” across Mumbai that saves the city from a terror disaster are so ingeniously implanted into the kinetic plot that you wonder which came first: the scourge of terrorism or the cinema that takes terror to the level of high entertainment.
This, then, is that entertainer which tells you that cinema about terrorism need not be dark and grim. Murugadoss keeps the going light-hearted, and yet the undercurrents of tension jump out of the screen to relentlessly claim our attention. Akshay’s character’s basic argument that terrorism can only be countered when the counter-terrorists are as fearless about losing their lives as the terrorists, is put forward with such gusto and conviction, we really can’t argue with the plot premise.
So here’s your chance to go with the ferocious flow and not regret it for even a minute. Yes, the songs are like sleeping dogs that come awake at inopportune times to yelp out their melody-less messages. But the last farewell song, an ode to the dedication and sacrifices of Indian soldiers, will leave you moist-eyed.

As armyman Virat Bakshi,Akshay Kumar is in top form in A R Murugadoss’ Holiday: A Soldier Is Never Off Duty which turned 11 on June 6. Akshay plays a soldier who is home for a vacation . He uses the time to fall in love with an arranged match and also save Mumbai from sleeper-cell terrorist attack which threatens to plunder the city.He is a busy man. So is director A R Murugadoss. They both are on the same mission.While Akshay saves the city, his director rescues the masala fare from the blemishes of blandness that it has acquired lately.

In an interview conducted by this writer immediately after the release , Akshay had said, “In Holiday I play a deadly fantasy version of a life that I would have had if I had never been an actor. Playing this role was so unbelievably intriguing, it was like I got to play my inner yin and yang. One minute I am a truly patriotic man, who fights for his country as well as his family, respecting all who walk in my path, then Boom!…Even the meanest people in the World don’t know what’s hit them when I get my hands on them!!”

In the film Akshay’s character feels a counter-terrorist must think like a terrorist. “Yes,because, in order to create good, I have to become evil. It was like playing the best reality video game ever, I’m the hero that gets to hunt down, crack codes, kill and torture Mumbai’s enemies, while falling in love, protecting families of fellow comrades, and saving my city from utter destruction.I couldn’t dream of a meatier role. I literally had the experience of a lifetime. This is one character I’m sad to say goodbye to.”

Akshay confessed his second career choice was always the army “Being Virat Bakshi in Holiday, was something I’ve waited a really long time to experience. As a bonus I got the genius director A.R.Murugadoss, the extremely intelligent script, the precious opportunity to play an army officer, the gritty subject, the demanding substance of my character from start to finish, showing the nation what people are prepared to go through in order to keep us safe , and then I had the film’s inviolable message to put across. No matter what happens, we will not be threatened by anyone, because we are India,and we are united, no-one shall cause bloodshed in our country, and get away with it, not while we still have our Indian Army to protect us!!I just kept thinking how lucky I was to be able to portray this terrific character. When I took my family to see it, they couldn’t believe it was me, they saw a side to me they didn’t know existed. I’ve played so many heroes’ roles over the years.But nothing compares to this.I thoroughly enjoyed the attention to detail, the plot, the circumstances, the twist, the impulse to choose a path that could kill thousands of innocent lives.Do you even know what it’s like for an adrenaline junkie actor like myself to get my hands on something so meaty and so vivid? I will thank Murugadoss a and his silent but violent brain for creating something so brilliant to play, for the rest of my career.And of course producer Vipul Shah .”