Alpha (2026) Review

Alpha is the seventh film in the YRF Spy Universe and has been called the first female-led Indian action film.

After the 1999 Kargil War, Colonel Fateh Singh Lakhawat (Bobby Deol) launches the Alpha project, a program to create super-soldiers. However, everyone who was given the Alpha serum dies, except a young girl whose mother was given the serum when pregnant. Fatel abducts the child and trains her to be the ultimate soldier. When Sita (Alia Bhatt) reaches adulthood, she goes rogue and sets out to kill everyone who greenlit the Alpha program.

The YRF Spy Universe has been popular. The first six films made an estimated $433 million to $438 million at the box office. Sadly, for Alpha, it has been considered the dud of the series, with a disappointing $8.1 million at the box office so far. Indian critics have been well, critical; the film only has a 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a dismal 3.3 on IMDB from 21,000 votes. Yet, I had fun watching Alpha.

I have a soft spot for female-led action films. I have enjoyed films like Hanna and Atomic Blonde, and more recently had a blast watching They Will Kill You. As an action film, Alpha had well-executed sequences. The first major action set-piece was the best when Sita went around the secret government base and pretty much killed everyone. Sita was a badass as she used guns, knives, explosives, and hand-to-hand combat. Sita thought ahead, so she was able to get out of sticky situations. It’s the type of sequence the worst ‘critics’ on YouTube would hate. As the film progressed, the action did become more ridiculous. The third act was so over-the-top that Michael Bay would have called it excessive, but I was sitting in the cinema with a big, gleeful smile.

Alpha was pretty much a comic book film. Sita and her long-lost twin Durga (Sharvari) were basically Captain America, or, in their case, Captain India. They had increased strength and endurance, faster healing, and super hearing like Wolverine. Sita’s backstory felt comic-book-inspired because Sita was raised to be the ultimate assassin. The villain’s scheme involved using Sita so they could make more supersoldiers. Sita came across as a Lara Croft figure, a stoic badass with a similar dress sense. A sequence in a Buddhist temple felt like it would have been in a video game since it featured badass spies battling special forces soldiers dressed as modern ninjas.

There was also a bit of Alias in Alpha since there were a lot of family dynamics at play, from Sita being trained by her adopted father to Sita and Durga learning to trust each other. All the family melodrama, along with the action and overwritten dialogue, made Alpha into a glorious cheeseboard of a movie.

Alpha did have story ideas it could mine. It was about a family that was broken apart, that finally got to be united, but needed to overcome their distrust. Sita had every reason to be resentful since she grew up in a lab and was made into a weapon, whilst Durga got to live a normal life in Spain. Sita had understandable goals of revenge, which could make Alpha into a personal action film. It was a shame that by the third act, the film devolved into a piece of Indian nationalist propaganda that made Alpha more in line with a big-budget film from Russia or China.

The filmmakers did make some interesting story choices. Alpha had a 20-minute prologue that described what the Alpha project was and why Colonel Kaul (Anil Kapoor) gave his wife a secret government serum. The film was dense with story, where every twist and turn needed to be explained through flashbacks. It was excessive, and the storytelling could have been streamlined, but Bollywood have different cinematic roles compared to Western films. The obligatory segment in a foreign city was pretty much a music video that showed off Durga’s skateboarding and parkour skills in Valladolid. In Ek Tha Tiger, the first film in the series made use of Dublin as a setting and didn’t make it disposable.

Alpha was an over-the-top and ridiculous action that made it enjoyable on a basic level. However, it suffered from a simple idea stretched thin and the blatant political messaging towards the end.