REVIEW 318: BADLAPUR

Release date (India):	February 20, 2015
Director:	Sriram Raghavan
Cast: Language:	Varun Dhawan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Yami Gautam, Huma Qureshi, Radhika Apte, Divya Dutta, Kumud Mishra, Zakir Hussain, Vinay Pathak Hindi

“Don’t Miss The Beginning” is not just a promotional tagline we saw in the trailer. As it turns out, Badlapur: Don’t Miss The Beginning is the full title you will see on the Censor certificate and opening credit plate of director Sriram Raghavan’s latest cinematic offering.

It’s almost like an announcement and you’d better believe it, because the first 10-15 minutes of this film are perfectly edited, intelligently directed and very cleverly written. I think I stopped breathing for part of that time, initially caught up in intrigued anticipation, then in utter shock and then overwhelmed with curiosity about what might follow.

Sadly, the rest of the film doesn’t match up. The primary reason is that the denouement is anti-climactic. Badlapur also needed to quicken its pace and take a surgeon’s knife to its flab.

The aim appears to have been to create a ruminative, calm and collected thriller. It might have worked too if so many well-crafted scenes raising expectations weren’t followed by dampeners. This is a disappointment for those of us who loved Raghavan’s excellently paced Ek Hasina Thi and Johnny Gaddaar (let’s pretend we never saw Agent Vinod).

Here’s how Badlapur goes. A bright young Pune-based ad executive called Raghu (Varun Dhawan) loses his family to two bank robbers. One escapes the police while the other is caught, refuses to reveal his accomplice’s name and is sentenced to 20 years in prison. As Raghu unravels before our eyes, three questions seem designed keep us viewers hooked:

Why did this criminal give up his liberty rather than give up his partner in crime?

Why did he choose (yes he actually chose) to be the one who is caught of the two?

Did he have a specific plan that would benefit him more than his abettor?

You may accept that the answer to Question 1 is: loyalty, with a resultant financial pay-off being the light  at the end of that dark tunnel. You may assume, once you’ve watched the post-interval portion, that the answer to Question 2 is: Liak (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) was sure Harman (Vinay Pathak) would buckle under the pressure of a police interrogation or prison. Fair enough. The utter let-down is the answer – or the lack of it – to Question 3.

Where Badlapur gets things right though, it really gets it right: that introduction; the strength of the writing when the going is good (a pity about those intermittent troughs); Sachin-Jigar’s songs; and some wicked editing between murders that leaves the audience briefly confused. 

Siddiqui rules. The man just outdoes himself in each scene. Badlapur is his master class in acting. The supporting cast too is amazing, in particular that lovely girl Radhika Apte who we need to see more in Bollywood, Pathak, Kumud Mishra and Zakir Hussain who shines though he gets just a few minutes on screen. In fact, a Siddiqui-Hussain face-off is Badlapur’s best scene.

As for Varun Dhawan, no, I will not say he is a pleasant surprise because it was clear from Student of the Year (SOTY) that both he and Sid Malhotra were capable of much more than fluff (Alia Bhatt proved herself only subsequently). Dhawan doesn’t yet have the depth of his co-stars in Badlapur but it’s clear that he’s got the potential to grow into that depth. He has also evidently worked hard to largely subsume that cutesy drawl with which he speaks naturally and which is fine in bubblegum pop cinema but not in a grittier film like Badlapur. It is a joy to see that this young star, with a triad of box-office hits in the young romance genre – SOTY (2012), Main Tera Hero (2014), Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania (2014) – is keen to expand his repertoire and range.

The only point at which the director becomes slightly conscious that Dhawan is a star with teen fans leads to an entirely superfluous moment in which Raghu needlessly strips off his shirt to display a deliciously ripped torso and arms, right before he commits an act of extreme violence.

SPOILER AHEAD

A more troublesome superfluous moment comes during the song-and-dance accompanying the closing credits, during which Huma Qureshi throws come-hither looks at Dhawan, which is jarring since Raghu had repeatedly raped her character, a sex worker called Jhimli/Shabnam. Why does Bollywood so often divorce the closing songs of films from the preceding story? In this instance, was Team Badlapur being thoughtless? Or can it be that they take rape lightly? Or do they, like so many others, believe that assaulting a sex worker is not as heinous as raping other women? Odd, because Raghavan showed such sensitivity towards his heroine in Ek Hasina Thi. 

Badlapur then is inconsistent, often praiseworthy, too often not, occasionally even tacky – oh why wasn’t that aspiring-to-be-profound game of Scrabble scissored out?! The film raises some interesting questions about what vengeance does to those who seek it. It also boasts of many memorable scenes peopled with brilliant actors. The overall feeling though is one of a sporadically, episodically effective film that doesn’t quite add up.

Rating (out of five): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	135 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badlapur_(film)

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KEoZanqlOE 

Trailer courtesy: Everymedia PR