‘Alpha’ movie review: Alia Bhatt fires up a stale spectacle

The YRF Spy Universe is running out of breathing room. What started as a focused story about one legendary agent has morphed into a crowded superhero-style playground where every major Bollywood star needs their own badge. After much delay, this week, Alia Bhatt jumps into the fray to bring some gender parity to a world ruled by men for over a decade. Traditionally, in spy movies, female characters were usually romantic interests, sidekicks, or spies who still needed the male hero to handle the big boss.

Here, Alia is Alpha unto herself, not standing in anyone’s shadow. She is the central anchor of the mission, seeking to carry a massive, high-budget action franchise completely on her own shoulders. The actor doesn’t cut any corners for the physical and visual transformation required for the part of a trained, genetically altered operative.

Most action stars lock their faces into a blank, tough-guy stare when they fight. Alia does the exact opposite. She uses her expressive face to tell the story of the fight, making every punch and kick feel deeply personal. Almost like abhinaya in a classical dance presentation, she injects a wicked sense of personality in Sita, a blend of snark and sass to hide the emotional vulnerability of an orphan deep down, but leaving the door a little open so that we can feel the cracks in her armour. Just as Satya in Jigra is an isolated survivor stripped of her safety net, Sita is an isolated survivor, but Alia brings the confidence of a predator to Sita. If Satya was blank, almost on the verge of crumbling, here her glares and smirks make you feel that she is in complete control of the chaos.

However, intentions aside, the problem is that there is hardly any freshness in the story, and Alia struggles to keep it from feeling like a comic strip spread over two hours. Writers Uday Chopra, Shridhar Raghavan, and Ishita Moitra blend ancient Indian mythology with Marvel flicks, but it ultimately feels like an unoriginal mashup. A jingoistic man in uniform, Fateh (Bobby Deol), launches a secret plan to create super soldiers with the help of a doctor (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) by injecting a serum that he named Alpha. Perhaps, he picked a vial from the sets of Animal!

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The experiment goes awry, and Fateh is demoted. However, in between, his mentor Kaul (Anil Kapoor) injects it into the bloodstream of his pregnant wife (Dia Mirza) to save her from congenital heart disease. She could not be saved, but the chemical alters the daughter’s genes. Fateh misleads Kaul, takes ownership of the girl, and raises her as a killing machine called Sita.

Alia Bhatt and Sharvari Wagh in ‘Alpha’
| Photo Credit:
YRF Studios

The promotional campaign essentially gave away the entire puzzle, leaving the cross-border Pakistan connection as the only real mystery left for the theatre. And it has become a permanent checkbox on the Bollywood spy-thriller shopping list. Not pretending to be profound, it is better than the mind-numbing War 2. Director Shiv Rawail tries to mask the hollow core with emotional tension, and there are passages that bring you towards the edge of your seat, but overall, one feels the writing department definitely needs a massive dose of Alpha serum to inject some energy, depth, and originality into the franchise. A Hrithik Roshan cameo here, a smart drone shot there, are not enough.

While the script and the scenery feel like a glossy commercial of an SUV or high-end trekking apparel, the hand-to-hand combat fights, set to an adrenaline-pumping background score, are where Alpha actually grabs your attention. Sharvari matches Alia’s intensity in dramatic and combat scenes, making you believe the girls are cut from the same genetic material. Their dynamics work well, but the makers don’t delve into it and quickly return to gunshots and choppers.

The film is not short of powerhouse performers. As the antagonist, Bobby gets a meaty role, and he bites into it with full force. His eyes exude an inherent innocence, which makes him such a deadly villain. It makes his sudden bursts of violence twice as terrifying because you never see them coming, but the screenwriters don’t give him a compelling backstory to complement his efforts. While the film belongs to its leading ladies, the solid presence of Bobby and Anil cannot be understated. Their commitment and intensity provide enough dramatic weight to keep a shallow, derivative script afloat for those who marvel at spectacle rather than storytelling.

Alpha is currently running in theatres.

Published – July 03, 2026 05:51 pm IST