This tale of heroism and comrades in arms is getting a release in the UK to celebrate the legendarily fearless Gurkha soldiers from Nepal and north-east India, who have been closely allied with the British army. Indeed, lead actor Ritesh Chams is a real-life retired Gurkha who fought and was wounded in Afghanistan, which adds a tang of authenticity to his performance, as it does with several other of the cast who are also former soldiers. That said, director Milan Chams’s script, co-written with Giriraj Ghimire, is chock full of cliches and cornball sentimentality – which will possibly make this reassuringly familiar for its intended audience. The opening framing has an elderly man in the present day laying flowers on 11 November at a mountaintop monument, paying his respects to ancestors and fallen soldiers. He explains to his grandchild that he’s there to honour those who fought “gallantly and died in the world wars”. That may be a badly translated subtitle or a bit of misdirection, because the conflict we see the younger version of this old man fighting is in fact the Malayan Emergency of 1948-60 in which the Gurkhas fought alongside British soldiers against communist pro-independence insurgents – a whole other ball of wax. Either way, politics and colonialism are not on the minds of the young men we meet: a typical war movie motley crew of jokers, rascals, and noble heroes who are there to do their soldierly duty and get back home to their families. It’s not clear which one is our wizened narrator, but the guy who emerges as the story’s main hero is Cpl Birkha Bahadur Rai (Chams) who is assigned, along with his buddies, to go into the jungle and rescue some fellow soldiers who have been kidnapped by a scenery-chewing Malay bad guy. And so they trudge through mud, treacherous terrain and tiger territory, sometimes cracking wise but mostly looking determined. Back home, Birkha’s young wife and his mother cry a lot and wish he would come home soon. The big, gestural performances owe more to Indian cinema traditions than the war films of, say, Howard Hawks or Steven Spielberg, but that’s fine. Gurkha Warrior is released in UK cinemas on 10 November.