This uncomfortably intense true-crime thriller is only for viewers with a high threshold for graphic violence, as it imagines what news cameras couldn't show during the coordinated terrorist assaults on Mumbai between November 26 and 29, 2008. For days reporters and onlookers camped outside the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel while fewer than a dozen Pakistani jihadists marauded the lobby and hallways of the 550-room historic edifice, killing everyone in sight, until the gunmen's overseas handlers instructed them by cell phones to begin taking a few wealthy hostages. In a composite role, Dev Patel stars as a waiter who, along with other courageous staffers, elects to stay behind to protect guests; Armie Hammer and Nazanin Boniadi play an American architect and his Iranian wife who won't leave because their infant son and his nanny are trapped on another floor. Working from eyewitness accounts and CCTV security footage, first-time feature director Anthony Maras recreates the carnage in meticulous detail, while showing that the vicious attackers were gullible youths from backgrounds so impoverished that some had never before seen a flushing toilet. The movie's coda cements the overarching message of extolling heroism and the survivors' refusal to let terror define them. But that moral still rings a little hollow, if only because as long as disproportionately large numbers of have-nots wither from neglect and indifference across our overpopulated globe, the haves will never really feel safe—nor should they. With Anupam Kher, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, and Jason Isaacs as a brutish Russian playboy who finds a conscience. In English and subtitled Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Greek, Russian, Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi.
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Hotel Mumbai
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- Hotel Mumbai
Credits
Director:
- Anthony Maras
Cast:
- Armie Hammer
- Jason Isaacs
- Nazanin Boniadi
- Dev Patel
- Angus McLaren
- Anupam Kher
- Tilda Cobham-Hervey
Writers:
- Anthony Maras
- John Collee
Producers:
- Anand Tharmaratnam
- Andrea Quesnelle
- Andrew Ogilvie
- Anthony Maras
- Barbara Gibbs
- Basil Iwanyk
- Brent Robert Williams
- Brian Hayes
- Bryce Menzies
- Catherine Prosser
- Dejay Vi Nguyen
- Dev Patel
- Dilip Chugani
- Gary Ellis
- Gary Hamilton
- Jiang Wei
- Joan Peters
- Joe Thomas
- John Collee
- John Zeng
- Jonathan Fuhrman
- Joseph Newton Cohen
- Julie Ryan
- Kabir Ahuja
- Kent Kubena
- Manraj S. Sekhon
- Marc Iserlis
- Mark Montgomery
- Masaaki Tanaka
- Mike Gabrawy
- Min-Li Tan
- Natalya Pavchinskaya
- Philip Moross
- Prateek Saxena
- Pravesh Sahni
- Richard Toussaint
- Ryan Hamilton
- Simmran Bedi
- Tara Finegan
- Viren Ahuja
- Ying Ye
