It seems a nice idea to project differently-abled children in a challenging situation as a film to inspire other children. The Silent Heroes has been written and directed by a Mahesh Bhatt, not “the” veteran filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt.

Priyanka Panchal along with four others educates deaf and mute students in Uttarakhand. The school is surrounded by the scenic mountains of the Himalayas. Priyanka’s colleagues, for one of whom she has special feelings, become victims of an avalanche while on an expedition in the mountains. He dies leaving his dream of training a bunch of his deaf and mute students into adventurous mountaineers. Priyanka rues both, losing her love as well as his incomplete dream.

That is when she comes across Maanuv Bhardwaj, who specialises in survival tactics. The local mountaineering academy also gets involved and the project is taken up to train volunteer deaf and mute children for a mountain climbing expedition. It starts with training the kids. But, sadly for the children, Maanuv meets with an accident and is replaced by Simran Deep, a sadist without a cause, who acts bitchy for the sake of it and thinks it is futile to waste time on these children. She derides them all the time. She also makes sure she sets impossible targets for them.

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While she is setting up the climb for children, Simran and her help both fall off a cliff and are rendered inactive. Now the very children she derided and thought good for nothing, use their other gifts they have instead of speech and ability to hear. They tend to her. They use their basic training and carry her to a river to await a stray rafter. But, when no rafter comes along, they use their bedding sheets and empty water bottles to put together a makeshift raft to carry her to the closest place of humanity where she can get medical attention without which she would need amputation of her leg. 

While the children are carrying her on a raft they created, help is on the way in the form of Maanuv and Priyanka. The raft is coming apart in the heavy current of Gangotri but, things work out eventually.

This could have been an inspirational film for children. Instead, it is so slack and overly dramatised, that it is tough to sit through the film. The script just never stabilises and carries on painfully. As for direction, it is patchy. There are songs galore in the background, which do not mean anything. Editing is nonexistent. Background music is jarring. Performances are bad to passable.

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The Silent Heroes is a worthless film, which serves no purpose whatsoever.

Producers: Kamal Birani, Mahesh Bhatt.

Director: Mahesh Bhatt.

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Cast: Maanuv Bharadwaj, Priyanka Panchal, Mann Bagga, Simran Deep, Nirmal Kumar, TarunBhargav, Gurfareen Bano, Khwaish Gupta, Aashish Chauhan, Jaideep Rawat, SamrennBano, Prakhar Chamoli, Renu singh, ShwetaRawat, Radhika Chauhan, Nikhil Bhargav, Shalini Rawat.