Release date:
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April 29, 2016
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Director:
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Sabbir Khan
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Cast:
Language:
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Tiger Shroff,
Shraddha Kapoor, Sudheer Babu, Sunil Grover
Hindi
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Baaghi is a slickly packaged empty
vessel. The action choreography is striking, the locations are exquisite, the camerawork
polished, the art design impressive, the cast well dressed. Scratch the attractive
surface though, and you get a dated, cliched storyline that compartmentalises hero, heroine, villains and comedians
in the way Hindi films of the 1970s and 1980s did.
The story begins in the menacing
Bangkok den of a rogue called Raghav Shetty, who is on the lookout for Sia
Khurana. Cut to Hyderabad, where she is shooting for a film directed by her
Daddy, when the numero uno baddie’s goons abduct her. Martial arts expert
Ronnie Singh is
called in to rescue the damsel in distress. Ronnie and Sia have a past. Time
for explanatory flashback.
Cut to Kollam railway station in Kerala
where boy and girl met, girl pretended to resist boy, they fell in love, fate
split them up, reunited them, Raghav split them up again and so on.
It is a formula that is so dull
and dusted that even Sunny Deol has stopped revisiting it.
Baaghi’s writer Sanjeev Dutta seems to have a thing for
antiquity though. This is the sort of film where the hero is omnipotent and
successfully bashes up dozens of men single-handedly, as did male leads of pre-1990s
Hindi cinema who sought to replicate and cash in on the success of Amitabh
Bachchan’s Angry Young Man formula. Here, like it was back then, the heroine’s
only role is to be good-looking, charming and if possible
dance sweetly/sexily enough to make the hero fall in love with her, thus
providing him with a motivation to bash the bad
guys in the end.
The villains here
too are uni-dimensional cardboard cut-outs. Comedians are slotted in to relieve
tension even in the middle of a hectic chase. Love happens at the first sight
of a pretty face who fakes disinterest in the hero though of course she is keen
on him because, well, you know, after all he is the hero. What else was she created
for but to fall for him?
Besides, do we not also
know that when a woman says “no” she means “maybe”? Ronnie, an absolute
stranger who just met Sia a few minutes back on a train, blows a kiss to her
from a station platform. She shows irritation but turns away to hide a smile. This
film may not be as aggressive or overt as the song Koi haseena jab rootth jaati hai from Sholay, Jumma chumma de de
from Hum, Jumme ki raat from Kick
or Tu hi to hai from Holiday, but it does make that
regressive point all the same.
The film’s only USPs
are its only novelties. First, it is set almost entirely in Kerala, which translates
into an eyeful of stunning locales, the famed snake boat race (vallam kali) in scenic backwaters and
miles of greenery all around. Second, Ronnie is in Kerala to learn the state’s
traditional martial arts form Kalaripayattu, which has a way of transforming
men into Rudolf Nureyev and Birju Maharaj while they smash and slice other
human beings to bits.
Tiger Shroff as
Ronnie gets the bulk of the film’s fights and has clearly worked hard to learn
Kalari. Many points to him for that and what he has achieved with his body. He
must, however, control the tendency to pose about, which is never more evident
than in scenes where he replicates his Guru’s moves and comes across as a
mannequin, while the old man looks like a battle axe and a ballet dancer rolled
into one.
In terms of acting,
Tiger’s exaggerated expressions are one with the film’s penchant for
overstatement. To be fair, he seems like he would do better with better direction, even if it is hard to ignore the fact that his
Caucasian facial features make him a bit of a misfit in Indian cinema. He
absolutely does not look Punjabi, although that is what he is meant to be in
this film; he looks European. Perhaps he will figure a way around that.
And while I’m all
for men showing off their beautiful bodies on screen, could someone explain why
so many Hindi film heroes these days make it a point to rip off their shirts before
a fight? Sure
they look good, but is there a scientific logic here that has escaped me? Just
asking.
Shraddha Kapoor as
Sia is well turned out and gets a couple of fight scenes of her own. It is nice
to see the actress throwing punches and kicks with such elan. Her acting in the
early scenes though, is over-cutesified. Time to cross over into the adult
world, girl. You are too good to waste yourself playing and replaying a
child-like innocent who is an appendage to the hero.
Of the remaining
performers, Sudheer Babu Posani merits a mention for his Kalari moves as Ronnie’s
bête noir Raghav Shetty. It is curious though that Sudheer, who is a Telugu
actor, manages his Malayalam diction so poorly in the film. He keeps addressing
his father as “Aachan” when it should be “Achchan”, a word that even a north
Indian might easily get right if you point out that the “chch” is pronounced precisely
as it is in Bachchan. Simple, no?
Veteran Sanjay Mishra and Sumit
Gulati (who we saw last year in Talvar)
enter the picture at one point to provide what is conventionally called “comic relief”.
If a blind man bumping into things or mistakenly feeling up a woman’s legs
makes you laugh, then the director has got what he wants. Some people,
hopefully, have better taste.
Director Sabbir Khan made his
debut with Kambakkht Ishq in 2009 starring
Kareena Kapoor and Akshay Kumar, which he followed up with Tiger and Kriti
Sanon’s debut Hindi film Heropanti in
2014. Both films revealed his love for bombast.
In Baaghi, he adds to his shoulders the burden of targeting Salman
Khan and Akshay’s traditional audience. And so, Tiger is given an old-style
punchline to repeat through the film: “Itni bhi jaldi kya hai? Abhi toh maine start kiya hai.” (What’s
the rush? I’ve only just begun.) It is hard to imagine why the producers
thought this ordinary writing would be as memorable as, say, Salman’s “Ek baar jo maine commitment ki, toh
apne aap ki bhi nahin sunta” (Once I make a commitment, I do not allow myself
to hold me back) or that Tiger has the panache to elevate it.
More triteness
comes in the form of Baaghi’s effort
to cash in on the prevailing tension between India and our neighbour China, as
Hindi cinema once did with Chinese-looking villains around the time of the 1962
war or before that in the just-post-Independence era when seemingly Western Roberts
were the bad people. Here, Raghav’s henchman Yong tells Ronnie: “You killed my
brother, you Indian. You think you can fight? We fight. Chinese fight.” Ronnie beats
him to pulp before replying grandly, “Sorry, China ka maal zyaada tikta nahin hai” (Chinese goods do not last long).
Might as well have gone
a step further with a crowd-pleasing, sarkar-pleasing
“Bharat Mata ki jai!” yelled out by
the hero. The chest-thumping suits the film’s emptiness. Gloss sans substance tends
to make a lot of noise.
Rating
(out of five): *1/2
CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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140 minutes
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
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