Rajeev Masand – movies that matter : from bollywood, hollywood and everywhere else

August 30, 2019

Cast: Prabhas, Shraddha Kapoor, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Jackie Shroff, Chunky Pandey, Mahesh Manjrekar, Mandira Bedi, Arjun Vijay

Director: Sujeeth

Saaho, which stars Prabhas in his first screen outing since the Baahubali films, took almost two years to complete, cost roughly Rs 350 crores to make, clocks in at nearly three hours, and leaves you with the kind of pounding headache that’ll take the better part of the day to recover from. At one point in the film Chunky Pandey, who plays a nostril-flaring crime boss named Devraj, threatens someone, saying, “I will put you through a lot of pain.” He might as well be speaking to the audience.

Written and directed by Sujeeth, Saaho is the sort of film that pretends to be smarter than it actually is. It has a convoluted plot that’s crammed with twists and turns, and secret identities and big reveals. Yet, when stripped to the bone, it’s ridiculously silly. Jackie Shroff plays Roy, the head of a crime syndicate in a fictional land named Waaji, who is killed the very night he lands in India. Let’s just say the issue of his successor is a complex one. Closer home, meanwhile, the Mumbai police force’s star attraction Ashok (Prabhas) has been tasked with ferreting out a mysterious figure known only as Shadow (and played by Neil Nitin Mukesh), who’s believed to be the brain behind an ingenious theft of Rs 2,000 crores.

There’s a lot going on in the film, but not a lot of it is especially compelling. Any expectation of logic and any semblance of reality quickly goes out of the window after Prabhas’ character is introduced running up every floor of a chawl, vanquishing criminal elements and miscreants including – wait for it – a python, and in another flat, a deadly black panther.

I think it’s fair to say that the mantra of this movie is ‘anything goes’. The action jumps from one part of the globe to another without explanation, Ashok never misses an opportunity to shake a leg with fellow crime-fighter Amritha Nair (Shraddha Kapoor), and the crime syndicate appears to have a roster of heavily tattooed, imaginatively hairstyled henchmen who show up anywhere and everywhere to make trouble. The McGuffin in this story is something called a Black Box that Shadow has his sights on, and as you may have guessed, it is of course linked to the Roy empire.

Now I don’t want to be the party pooper who’s looking for logic in a dumb action tentpole. To be fair we don’t ask these questions of a Fast and Furious film or a Mission Impossible movie, or even from the Race franchise in Bollywood. But the truth is that Saaho isn’t content with being a dumb action tentpole with slick set pieces – it insists on sweeping you into its plot, which is more than you can offer given how singularly harebrained it is.

Literally the film’s only saving grace is its leading man who sportingly goes along with what’s expected of him. He is both tough guy and gentle giant; he is both romantic hero and rock-hard-abs-sporting-action-star. It’s a shame the film does little justice to his enormous presence and his unmistakable sincerity. In one bizarre yet oddly fascinating sequence he leaps, shirtless, into the open sky, as it turns out to rescue his damsel. Any actor who agreed to do that scene without questioning its relevance or logic deserves your sympathy.

Others like Shraddha Kapoor, Chunky Pandey, Mahesh Manjrekar, Mandira Bedi, Tinnu Anand, and Neil Nitin Mukesh barely register despite reasonable screen time. You can hardly be blamed. The impressively staged but ultimately exhausting action sequences take up the bulk of screen time, but they can’t salvage this soulless film that has all the depth and emotional wallop of a video game.

I’m going with one-and-a-half out of five.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)

August 15, 2019

Cast: John Abraham, Mrunal Thakur, Rajesh Sharma, Manish Chaudhury, Ravi Kishan, Nora Fatehi

Director: Nikhil Advani

Whatever else one may think of the film, you’ve got to hand it to Batla House that it hits the ground running. Within the first few minutes itself, director Nikhil Advani recreates the controversial 2008 Batla House encounter in Delhi in which two young men believed to be members of the Indian Mujahideen were killed, along with a police officer. It’s a solid opening.

Ritesh Shah’s script fashions itself as a Rashomon-style pursuit of the truth. The incident begs several questions: Was the Delhi Police telling the truth? Were the men who were killed Islamic terrorists or university students? Was the encounter staged by the cops?

The outrage that follows the incident suggests that the politicians, the media, and even others in the force had doubts about the police’s version of the facts. John Abraham stars as DCP Sanjeev Kumar, who is modelled after Sanjay Kumar Yadav, the real-life officer who led the Delhi Police Special Cell that conducted the operation. The film portrays him as a man haunted by guilt, crippled by post-trauma stress, troubled on account of his failing marriage. He is plagued by hallucinations, and plunged into an unfamiliar funk. At one point he hands over his dismantled gun to his wife, unsure if he can trust himself with it.

It’s a fascinating premise, and an especially unlikely character for John. To be fair he submits to it, delivering a quiet, restrained performance. But the film can’t decide what it wants to be – a melancholic character piece, or a thriller with chases and shootouts. The action scenes are appropriately tense and impressively staged, but the narrative is routinely slowed down by a clutch of unnecessary songs. ((pause))

Sanjeev’s wife, a television news anchor played by Mrunal Thakur, is a key figure in the story. But the film barely does any justice to her character, giving little room to the talented actress to breathe life into it. The other crucial role belongs to Rajesh Sharma, kitted out in a scraggly white wig as the prosecutor arguing against Sanjeev in court. This last act is gripping, not least because the script plays to the gallery with rousing monologues and clap-trap lines.

There is much to admire in Batla House but the film is ultimately betrayed by its own prejudices. In one scene Sanjeev wakes up from a nightmare in which he’s mobbed by men wearing skull caps. The film wants to be viewed as a complex search for answers, a nuanced, layered drama about an incident from the past whose central conflict is as relevant today. That sounds good on paper. In practice though the film is lacking in any complexity or nuance.

I’m going with two-and-a-half out of five for Batla House. It’s never a complete waste of time, but there was potential for so much more.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)

August 15, 2019

Cast: Akshay Kumar, Vidya Balan, Sonakshi Sinha, Taapsee Pannu, Nithya Menen, Kirti Kulhari, Sharman Joshi, HG Dattatreya, Vikram Gokhale

Director: Jagan Shakti

Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, the popular adage goes. But Mission Mangal upends that idea with the story of a space mission to Mars propelled predominantly by female energy. The film is a fictionalised account of Mangalyaan, the ISRO Mars program that was launched in 2013 and which features headlining roles for the scientists – most of them women – behind that ambitious endeavour.

The mission was a moment of pride in more ways than one. India was the first country to crack a Mars mission in its first attempt, and at a budget of roughly Rs 454 crores, a fraction of the cost of other international space missions. Mangalyaan’s story, then, is ripe for the big screen. It is the blockbuster cliché – the underdogs who beat insurmountable odds. Helmed by first-time director Jagan Shakti, Mission Mangal is helped along by the star power of Akshay Kumar, but it is elevated by smart filmmaking, and a clutch of winning performances led by the excellent Vidya Balan.

This is a movie about space, scientists, facts and physics, but there is no dearth of emotion. Some of it is trite and there is manipulative pop patriotism – the sort you expect from an Akshay Kumar film. Yet Mission Mangal is more restrained in tone than the star’s recent outings like Kesari, PadMan, and Toilet: Ek Prem Katha. There are also genuine moments in the film when you laugh, and when your heart soars. Despite the formulaic arc, the makers deliver an entertaining account of a complicated mission.

Akshay plays Rakesh Dhawan, who heads the mission. This is a scientist who has dedicated his life to ISRO, with no time for distractions like love or family. After a failed mission, he is “demoted” to a Mars program, in the hope that he will take the hint and quit. In one of the film’s charming scenes he walks into a dusty office in a deadbeat building at ISRO that has been allocated for the Mars program. An optimist who’s always ready with a joke or an old Hindi song, he pretends that the barren space is the Red Planet. As a clay water pot releases a trickle, and a stray cat jumps in through the window, he jokes that there is both water and life on Mars.

Akshay’s character is clearly the leader, but the brains belong to Tara Shinde (Vidya), who comes up with the idea of chasing the Mars dream with a low-cost rocket and satellite. This brainwave comes from the practice of frying pooris on a no-flame, a concept she cheerily demonstrates to ISRO top brass. Cleverly, but also a tad simplistically, the film employs accessible (and frequently eye-rolling) theories and concepts to explain the science of the mission to a lay audience.

 And because desi films must have a videsi villain, we get NASA-returned Rupert Desai (Dalip Tahil), who assigns a ragtag bunch of juniors to the Mars program, unwilling to waste his best men for an impossible project. Sonakshi Sinha, Taapsee Pannu, Kirthi Kulhari, Nithya Menen, Sharman Joshi, and HG Dattatreya make up the rest of the team, each bringing their respective backstory. Vidya’s is the best realised of the lot; she’s a wife and mother juggling domestic responsibilities with her consuming passion for science.

There are some contrived bits, like one in which the team happily takes up brooms and brushes to spruce up their office while humming an upbeat song. Or a needless fight in the Bangalore metro, scripted presumably to turn the cliché of women as victims on its head. In fact, the makers cram a lot into the film – there are token pleas for inclusion, religious tolerance, and gender equality. The film could’ve been crisper and sharper without these distractions, and might have come up at least 10 minutes shorter. But as frequently happens when you’re invested in a story or its characters, you’re willing not to sweat the small stuff.

There is some pandering at the end with a flashback of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s congratulatory address in 2014. Perhaps the makers would’ve done well to have also included that the Mangalyaan project was announced in the year 2012 by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Of the cast, Akshay Kumar is reliably strong, bringing irreverence and humour to the proceedings, as if to make sure the film never becomes ‘too smart’. There’s also sound acting from the other actors, particularly Taapsee Pannu and Nitya Menen, and plenty laughs from Kannada actor Dattatreya. But it’s Vidya Balan who truly stands out, diving into her role of the impassioned scientist with full commitment. Vidya makes it convincing that her character’s ideas are fuelled by day-to-day life examples.

Ultimately, Mission Mangal is enjoyable and entertaining. Even the jingoism doesn’t feel entirely out of place. Director Jagan Shakti delivers a space movie that lifts off and frequently soars. I’m going with three-and-a-half out of five.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)