My Alpha review starts with the obvious: this is Captain America and Black Widow wearing a different set of clothes, and it doesn’t try very hard to hide it. There’s a super soldier serum, a woman who becomes a soldier because of it, a sister with powers of her own, and a lot of people hitting each other very well. And I enjoyed it, which surprised me a bit going in. I’d give Alpha a 7 out of 10, and by the end I was more interested in how good it looked than in how familiar it felt.
The Captain America bit, and the Black Widow bit
The setup is a mother who’s injected with a super soldier serum, and the daughter who grows up to become a soldier herself, played by Alia Bhatt. If that sounds like Steve Rogers and the whole Winter Soldier business, well, yes. The serum is the engine of the story, the same way it is in the Marvel films, and the film asks the same questions about what it does to a person and who gets to decide how it’s used.
Then there’s the Black Widow side, and that’s the training, the spy-school feel, a woman who has been shaped from childhood to do a job. The sister with powers is the part that gets to be a little different, and it gives the film a family angle that I thought worked well enough. I’ll be honest and say that if you’ve watched the Marvel films you’ll spot every beat coming, and some of the plot is “rip off” territory in the best sense, a story I knew and was happy to see told again with a different cast. It’s the same reason a good cover version can be a pleasure, you already know the words and you’re listening for how it’s sung.
Anil Kapoor is in this, and he’s always worth watching, bringing the sort of weight that makes the scenes with him feel like they matter. Bobby Deol is the villain, and he’s got the kind of presence that suits the part. Alia Bhatt is the one carrying it, and she’s good, convincing in the quiet scenes and in the ones where she’s running through a building, and she holds her own in the fights.
The action, and how far Indian movies have come
This is the part I most wanted to talk about, because the action is properly good. What stands out is how far Indian films have come, in the effects, in the stunt work, in the look of the thing, and in the story, which is more ambitious than I’d have guessed. Alpha has set pieces that wouldn’t feel out of place in a big Hollywood spy film, the fights are staged with real thought, and the camera is clear about who’s hitting whom, which is more than I can say for some of the American stuff.
The effects are the other thing. The serum powers, the sister’s abilities, the bigger moments, all of them look expensive and they look finished, with none of the rough edges that used to give Indian effects work away. The green screen and wires that used to give these films away are gone, and the story and the spectacle finally feel like they’re in the same league. It reminded me of the way Thunderbolts uses a band of damaged operatives, and gets a lot out of a couple of them, except here the cast is bigger and the pace never lets up.
There’s the obligatory fan service too, and it comes when Alia Bhatt and her sister are swimming across the river on the way to the temple. It’s very much a Bollywood tradition, all glossy, look-at-them shots played with a wink, and it didn’t bother me, though it’s a reminder that this is a big commercial crowd-pleaser first and a serious spy thriller second.
Then come the two fights I’d point anyone to: the one in the Buddhist temple with Hrithik Roshan, and the one on the army base. Both are a bit more over the top than the rest of the film, and more typical of Bollywood, bigger and louder and happy to be a little ridiculous, and at the same time they’re exceptional in how they’re executed. The staging is sharp, the choreography is clear, and the scale of them is huge, so you can enjoy the silliness because the craft underneath it is so good. They were a lot of fun to watch, and honestly they’re the moments where the film stops borrowing from Marvel and feels like itself.
What I liked most is that the fights have variety. It isn’t one long brawl repeated in different rooms, there are close-quarters scraps, gunfights, and bigger moments built around what the serum lets people do, and each one has its own shape. When the powers come out they’re used to tell you something about the person using them, which is more than a lot of superhero films bother with. And because the action keeps changing, I never hit the point where I was waiting for the next talky bit, which for a film this long is the best compliment I can give it.
A spy universe of its own
Part of why the Marvel comparison keeps coming up is that Alpha isn’t a one-off, it’s the first woman-led film in Yash Raj’s spy universe, the run of films that already took in Tiger, Pathaan and War. That’s an Indian studio doing what Marvel did, building a shared world with characters who can cross over and a timeline that keeps growing, and it says a lot about the ambition on show that they’re doing it at all. I like that the franchise has a woman at the front for this one, and it fits the story, because the whole film is about someone made into a weapon who has to decide what to do with it.
It also explains the scale. A film that’s a standalone romance or drama doesn’t get this kind of budget for its fights, but a film that’s feeding a franchise does, and you can feel the money in the locations, the choreography and the sheer number of people in the frame. Hollywood has been doing this for twenty years and has the habit of making every entry feel like homework. Alpha, whatever else you say about it, doesn’t feel like homework, it feels like a studio that’s still excited by what it can do, and that enthusiasm rubbed off on me. The same goes for the pacing, which rarely stops to explain itself and trusts you to keep up, and for the way the film gives its supporting players moments of their own rather than leaving them to stand around while the leads fight.
And there’s the sister, who I keep coming back to because she’s the part of the story I’d have liked more of. Powers in a spy film are a risky thing, because they can swallow the grounded, gritty feel that makes the soldier side work, and the film mostly manages the balance. I’d have been happy to spend a whole hour just on the two of them and what the serum meant for their family, since that’s where the emotion is, and it’s the one place where Alpha stops being Captain America and Black Widow and becomes its own thing.
What held it back for me
If I have a complaint it’s that it’s too familiar. When a film borrows its main idea from two of the biggest franchises going, it has to do something fresh with it, and Alpha does some of that but not enough. There are stretches where I was ahead of it, and where I knew what the next beat was before the characters did. It’s a good film for the genre, and not one that’s going to change what a spy film can be, and a 7 is where I land because it’s fun, well made, and doesn’t quite earn the extra points.
It also made me curious about where this goes next, since it plays like part of a bigger world, and I’d happily watch another film with this cast even when the plot was one I’d seen before. If you like a big, loud action film and have an evening free on Netflix, put it on. A solid 7 out of 10. Have you seen Alpha yet, and does the Captain America comparison bother you or work for you? Tell me in the comments.
