Release date:
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March 4, 2016
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Director:
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Prakash Jha
|
Cast:
Language:
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Priyanka Chopra,
Manav Kaul, Prakash Jha, Ninad Kamat, Rahul Bhat, Vega
Tamotia,
Murli Sharma, Queen Harish
Hindi
|
Is this film the
fantasy Prakash Jha has been inching towards all these years? The
writer-director of Jai Gangaajal has
done well to cast Priyanka Chopra as Superintendent of Police Abha Mathur of
Bankipur – a tough cop who is keen to play by the rules – and Manav Kaul as
Babloo Pandey, a vicious politician who has a stranglehold on his constituency.
Where he goes wide of the mark though is in casting himself in a prominent role
and mistaking himself for Ajay Devgn.
The policeman he
plays in Jai Gangaajal – Bhola Nath
Singh a.k.a. Circle Babu, for whom integrity is a fluid concept – ends up as
the fulcrum of the story. The dilution of Priyanka/Abha and Manav/Babloo’s
storylines might still have been okay if Prakash Babu could act. He cannot.
When Abha and
Babloo’s paths intermittently cross, we get glimpses of what Jai Gangaajal might have been. When,
however, the spotlight repeatedly moves away from them and falls on
Prakash/Bhola, the film sags. The result: an uneven narrative which works when
Abha and Babloo are on screen but goes lacklustre in almost every scene focused
on Bhola Nath.
The set-up is
promising. The SP of Bankipur is transferred when he decides to take action
against Bhola for selling his soul to the region’s netas. In comes Abha, whose political mentor assumes she will do
his bidding while he works towards his goal of becoming Bihar’s chief minister.
He soon discovers that Abha is no puppet.
Bankipur at that
point is under a siege laid by Babloo and his brother Dabloo Pandey (Ninad Kamat)
who are terrorising the local farmers into selling off their land to make way
for a power plant being set up by a corporate giant. Every form of violence –
from emotional to physical – is unleashed on those who refuse. This leads to a
clash between Abha and Babloo. What follows is a set of circumstances that
causes Bhola Nath to turn over a new leaf. The story subsequently examines this
question: should honest police personnel stand by while the public takes the
law into their own hands to settle scores with netas and goondas who are
ruining their lives?
In a country where
online lynch mobs are increasingly demanding kangaroo courts and “off with his
head” medieval-era justice, where some news anchors and too many politicians
back populism and sensationalism over sanity, Jai Gangaajal could have been a crucial commentary on the dangers
of mobocracy. Abha’s determination not to bow to public pressure is important
in this respect because she is simultaneously battling corrupt politicians on
another front.
Unfortunately,
Prakash Babu sacrifices his heroine and this significant theme at the altar of
his ego. Too much screen space is given to Bhola Nath, too many close-ups, too
many fights, too many dialogues, too many silences, in short, too much of
everything, although the actor-director does not possess the acting talent or
screen presence to back the faith he has in himself.
Watching him in
action, I found myself getting nostalgic about Mukesh Tiwari’s brilliant
performance as the corrupt policeman Bacha Yadav who develops a conscience in Gangaajal, the 2003 precursor to this
film. Whatever your arguments may be with Gangaajal’s
politics, you have to concede that it possessed energy, focus, a sense of
urgency and a stellar cast. As Jai
Gangaajal persists in wandering away from Abha’s confrontation with Babloo,
it ends up being an overly long, terribly unoriginal production.
The film’s gender
politics is superficial and skewed. Quite ridiculously, the fact that Abha is a
woman SP of a conservative region seems to play zero part in the public and
politicians’ response to her. This could have been one of the distinguishing
factors between Jai Gangaajal and
most of the other police dramas we’ve seen in Bollywood history, but the film
fails to delve into this angle at all.
Priyanka has the
pizzazz and the body for difficult stunts, as we have already seen in Don 1 & 2. This film is further proof that she is well-suited to the action
genre. In fact, one of Jai Gangaajal’s
best-executed scenes has her single-handedly bashing up a rapist in a town
square (I am NOT commenting on police violence here, only her physical
prowess). What the film needed was more wolf-whistle-worthy fisticuffs
involving this charismatic star, more screen time for her and greater depth in
her characterisation.
Sadly, Jai Gangaajal does not tick any of these
three check-boxes.
As exasperating as
that fatal flaw is its token feminism. When a film goes against the Bollywood
norm by featuring a glamorous, commercially successful female star playing a
no-nonsense policewoman in the lead, it is clearly positioning itself as being
liberal on the gender front. Yet, Jai
Gangaajal casually throws up dialogues about men being eunuchs/neutered if
they are not empowered or courageous.
At one point, when
a junior sees Abha taking on Babloo’s goons for the first time, he says
admiringly: Aaj aap humey mard bana diye
hai, hum toh soche thhey ki hum napunsak hi mar jaayenge (Today, you have made us men. We were afraid we would die
eunuchs). He then proceeds to
bash up some villains because…in Jai
Gangaajal’s book, that’s what ‘real men’ do?
In a later scene,
Abha herself uses the word naamard
for a man she views with contempt. This is what happens when you make an
apparently feminist move, not out of conviction but because feminism is the fad
of the day and faking it is the latest social trend.
Still, when the
camera is on Priyanka Chopra and Manav Kaul, Jai Gangaajal is watchable. The film suffers sorely because Prakash
Jha makes it too much about himself.
Rating
(out of five stars): **1/2
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
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Running time:
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149 minutes
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