Film critics are like baseball umpires. Right and wrong are relative, so “consistency” is what matters.

If I panned the original “Top Gun,” kicked its sequel “Maverick” and torched the Chinese knockoff “Born to Fly,” it’s not as if I’m going to adore two hours and forty-four bloody minutes of India’s version of this “fighter jocks party and dogfight” jingoism.

I mean, the most Indian thing about this Indo-Pakistani conflict variation on an F-16 theme is Bollywood style love duets and a big Bollywood production number or two. What’s jingoism without dancing a jig in your musical interludes?

“Fighter” is sort of a mash-up between the first and second “Top Guns,” with a heaping helping of the inferior “Iron Eagle” “Top Gun” knockoffs of the ’90s.

It’s built around top drawer flight effects — lots of jets chasing each other over Kashmir and Pakistan, dogfighting and engaging in jet-to-jet trash talk.

“You may have won this battle by outsmarting us, Bloody INFIDELS!”

It’s the Air Dragons of India’s Air Force vs. Islamic terrorists in alliance with Pakistan, with F-16s battling F-16s and other aircraft (Sukhoi? Israeli?) with missiles and machine guns and bombs delivered in “surgical strikes.”

Everybody wants to avoid a war, save for the hunky terrorist Azhar Akhtar (Rishabh Sawhney), who seems furious at having the worst case of pink eye this side of Islamabad.

The Indian pilots, led by pilot-with-a-past Squadron Leader Shamsher “Patty” Pathania (Hrithik Roshan) , his CO Rocky (Anil Kapoor) and assisted by rescue chopper pilot Minni (Deepika Padukone) must contend with restrictive rules of engagement, airborne ambushes, howitzers passed off as anti-aircraft artillery and a villainous Pakistani ace code-named “Red Nose” (Behzaad Khan) in between song and dance numbers.

The acting is mostly posing, glaring and making eyes at one another in the middle of a dance number. The various Pakistani characters are seething caricatures.

There’s something very old school about Indian spectacles of this sort — the star-power/fan service, gorgeous actors in perfect hair breaking into song, peeling off their aviator air masks to deliver pithy put-downs and pausing to (mildly) denounce sexism in the culture and preach patriotism in parties, airports, on the flight line or wherever.

At some point, you either throw up your hands at any of these military recruitment films — American, Chinese or Indian — or just go with them, no matter how silly they start to seem, each in its own culturally-distinct silly ways.

I just consistently roll my eyes and opt for the former.

Rating” TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Hritthik Roshan, Deepika Padukone, Rishabh Sawhney, Anil Kapoor and Behzaad Khan

Credits: Directed by Siddharth Anand, scripted by Siddharth Anand, Abbas Dalal, Husssein Dalal, Ramon Chibb and Biswapati Sarkar. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:44