83 Movie Review: Witness The Great Journey Of Creating History

In the initial few minutes, Kabir Khan avails an intelligent passport sequence to introduce the characters of the film to the audience. He also uses a few dialogues to let you enter on the fact that Indians do not trust India to bring home the World Cup. That is when the audience understands that the movie is not about winning a world cup, it is all about earning deserved respect. 

At every sector in the film, Kabir has joined real images along with the reel ones – allowing one to sit up and take note of the idea that he has heavily endured in research and the recreation of illustrating moments in Team India’s 1983 World Cup tour. The audience through this realized that the movie was not all sport or all drama- it made a proper attempt to combine both. And to a huge degree, it was successful in doing so.

India’s love and inclination for cricket have a lot to contribute with the way the team of 1983 went on to dislocate the wind out of the West Indies, a closely unbeatable cricket team of the time, during the World Cup Finals in 1983. At one time during the match, the level of hope from Team India was comparatively low for a broadcaster to readily choose a match among giants, West Indies and Australia over a tournament between Zimbabwe and India. The latter was the tournament where Indian skipper Kapil Dev wrote history with the Mongoose bat, and it is those legendary innings that had not been documented on camera.

If you are paying to watch this film, that part alone will make your “paisa vasool”. The innings of Kapil Dev not only saved the day for this country, but they earned the team a position at the table and a large part of respect which it had been missing from every corner until then. The cricket control board in India, Indians who are living in India and abroad, from the domestic and international press and also from those who had already created a mark in the game, earned respect. The fact that no one took the intention of the captain to win the world cup seriously seems at varied points in the film which repeats what drove the team finally to put its best foot forward. Little sorrows, joys, glorious wins, internal upheavals, painful defeats that each player went through, their individual trips, and the journey of becoming a team that had the capability to trust itself to defeat the strongest men in the gentleman’s game, is what dramatic ‘83’ of Kabir Khan is all about.

When you see Ranveer Singh nailing the unmissable style of talking of Kapil Dev, totally recreating his Natraj shot on the pitch, his bowling action, and also his body language, you know you are in the lap of a sports drama that revolves around cricket. But when you hear Ranveer talk about why he believes, thinks, and feels the way he does for cricket, you hear a man telling you what makes him an eminent name in the game. We have all seen the iconic image of Kapil Dev holding up the world cup; the film goes into why we tend to feel emotionally pinned each time we see it.