It's no spoiler to say that the title character of this powerfully affecting true-life drama dies at the end.
The real woman's elderly mother tells us as much before the opening credits as, sitting in the production's mocked-up airline cabin, she bestows extravagant blessings on her daughter.
That daughter is Neerja Bhanot, a Mumbai native and Pan Am purser who died from gunshot wounds received as she shielded three children from terrorists who had hijacked her plane on the runway in Karachi on September 5, 1986.
Her courage and resourcefulness she engineered the safe escape of all but 20 of the 380 passengers and crew even as the hijackers ran amok, firing indiscriminately earned her posthumous awards for bravery in three countries: if her story is unfamiliar to audiences here, she is fabled on the sub-continent.
This film, which has been doing good business on the local Hindi-language circuit, is seeking a crossover audience, and it would be a mistake to dismiss it as a Bollywood curio.
