REVIEW 661: SIMMBA

Release date:	December 28, 2018
Director:	Rohit Shetty
Cast: Language:	Ranveer Singh, Sonu Sood, Ashutosh Rana, Sara Ali Khan, Ajay Devgn, Vipin Sharma, Sree Swara Dubey, Sulbha Arya, Guest appearances by Karan Johar, Kunal Khemu, Arshad Warsi, Tusshar Kapoor, Shreyas Talpade and Akshay Kumar Hindi with Marathi

If you are a serious, intellectual sort, chances are you will judge me for admitting this, but the truth is, I enjoyed Singham. Simmba has been positioned as a spin-off of that 2011 Ajay Devgn-starrer, but Rohit Shetty – who directed the earlier film too – forgot to include in this one the panache that made Singham’s melodrama and OTTness watchable and fun despite its formulaic nature.

In Simmba, Shetty replaces Devgn with Ranveer Singh, and exchanges a trigger-happy but financially clean policeman with a corrupt-as-hell cop who turns over a new leaf when a tragedy befalls him. If the earlier film took its story from Kollywood’s Singham, this one turns to Tollywood’s Temper for inspiration, and therein lies the problem.

Simmba is loud, steeped in clichés and has nothing going for it apart from the leading man’s comic flair and willingness to lose himself in a role, however silly it may be. Those qualities make the first half somewhat enjoyable despite its dated feel on many fronts. All is lost though by the second half when the screenplay shelves comedy in favour of grim speeches by a newly minted messiah of India’s beleaguered women.

Singh plays Inspector Sangram Bhalerao a.k.a. Simmba who has no qualms about admitting that he became a cop to make money. You see, as he explains in a weepy speech late into the plot, he had no loving Mummy nor a strict Daddy to give him thappads that would have set him right as a child. And so he took his cues from a bribe-taking local policeman.

The adult Simmba’s avarice takes a backseat though when the hand that feeds him turns on a person he loves. Because this is post-2012 Bollywood where ‘women’s empowerment’ is being seen as a saleable formula like any other, Simmba’s battle for justice for a rape victim is embellished by a courtroom monologue on the December 2012 Delhi bus gangrape and National Crime Records Bureau statistics for rape.

Just as the Indian public and press have felt driven to lionise a dead woman as The Fearless One (i.e. Nirbhaya) to make her worth fighting for, so also Simmba’s crusade is not for a mere woman who has been wronged, but for a woman he called his sister and for all the sisters and daughters of this country.

Hindi cinema has given us various live variants of Nirbhaya down the decades, from Dimple Kapadia’s rape-victim-turned-avenging-Durga in Zakhmi Aurat to Sridevi’s vengeful Mommy in Mom – because regular women are so darned pointless, I guess. The difference between these films and Simmba is that the Nirbhaya here is a man. Because as a junior cop tells Simmba: “Jab tak yeh rapist log ko apan policewala tthok nahin dega tab tak kucch nahin badlega.” (Nothing will change until we policemen kill off these rapists.)

Don’t be deceived by the apparent good intentions – women’s safety is just another excuse for Shetty’s macho hero to deliver speeches, take the law into his own hands, display his impressive biceps and single-handedly bash up groups of bad men.

Nothing underlines Simmba’s insincerity better than the sidelining of women in a film purportedly about women’s rights. Every female human in sight is a sidelight. Even Sara Ali Khan, who was so captivating in a substantial role on debut in Kedarnath, is reduced to being a pretty prop in the hero’s life. You can count the number of scenes she gets on the fingers of one hand.

Not that Singham was not patriarchal in a similar fashion – it was. But at least it had memorable male supporting characters, including the lead villain played by Prakash Raj. The usually dependable Sonu Sood is wasted in Simmba as the poorly written central antagonist.

More thought is given to the cameo by Devgn, an array of guest appearances (by Karan Johar, Kunal Khemu, Arshad Warsi, Tusshar Kapoor, Shreyas Talpade and Akshay Kumar) and self-referential tributes to Shetty’s filmography than to the entire lukewarm screenplay of Simmba.

Even Ranveer Singh’s pre-interval swag deserves to be forgotten by the end of the insufferable second half. As if to add insult to injury, after pontificating about women’s concerns throughout that portion, Simmba ends with the hero dancing surrounded mostly by large groups of nameless women in little skirts, with Sara Ali Khan occasionally chucked in – for variety, I suppose.

Never mind the rest of Team Simmba, Ms Khan, but you deserve better than this hypocritical nonsense. 

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	159 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/simmba-movie-review-ranveer-singhs-pizzazz-is-lost-to-a-cliched-womens-rights-saga-that-sidelines-women-5804601.html

Poster courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/SimmbaTheFilm/

REVIEW 361: DILWALE

Release date:	December 18, 2015
Director:	Rohit Shetty
Cast: Language:	Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, Varun Dhawan, Kriti Sanon, Varun Sharma, Mukesh Tiwari, Pankaj Tripathi, Sanjay Mishra, Boman Irani, Johnny Lever, Vinod Khanna, Kabir Bedi Hindi

There’s something about age that does wonderful things to people. Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol have always had great on-screen chemistry, but the 22 years that have passed since they were first seen together in a film have added an unfathomable, heart-wrenching element to their pairing. Team Dilwale should send up a prayer of thanks for this saving grace, because this is the first time the two have been called upon to carry a film through on the strength of nothing but – absolutely nothing but – that chemistry.

If you draw a sketch of the basic plot points of Dilwale, you will see the promise there. How the lead pair meet, the misunderstanding that leads to a parting of ways and the seemingly improbable circumstances that reunite them are all believable and potentially entertaining. The problem with the film though is that the threads used to weave these plot elements together are so disparate, so jumbled and so loosely put together, that the result is a bland, lifeless film.

Rohit Shetty, whose previous works could be accused of many things, but never a lack of energy, seems to have fallen asleep – perhaps with boredom? – in the director’s chair while making this film. That is one possible explanation for the lackadaisical nature of the storytelling from a man who in the past has given us Chennai Express and Singham (yeah yeah, I know it’s terribly unintellectual to say so, but I enjoyed both). All those cars careening about the screen cannot compensate for what feels like his own lack of interest in this project.

Dilwale suffers from limp writing and unenthusiastic direction. Even its clichés and stereotypes are too dull to be infuriating – like that distasteful and decidedly unfunny scene in which Johnny Lever pretends he is about to assault Kajol’s character; or the disappointingly medieval mindset which makes the film’s writer think, even in the year 2015, that there can be nothing more terrible than ladkiwaale who want their daamaad to live with them after marriage; or the regressive, populist monologue about the high cost of dating women these days by Varun Sharma’s character, while his girlfriend stands by unquestioningly, clearly never having heard of going Dutch on a date; or Sanjay Mishra’s character who forever spouts nonsensical rhymes in conversations, such as this one addressed to his sister: “Bol mere ghar ki laado, Rolex Rado.”

Hain?

All this fades into insignificance though each time SRK looks at Kajol. Not the clean-shaven, supposedly younger version of Shah Rukh in the film, but the older, wiser, bearded man whose role acknowledges his age with dignity and grace.

When he gazes at her or even just throws her a fleeting glance, and those eyes we’ve been seeing now for almost 27 years brim over with love and longing, tedium recedes into the background. It is a look that makes you want to reach out and hug him, to reassuringly pat him on the shoulder, to tell him that all will be well, to scream out the truth so that she realises that it was all just a misunderstanding.

The return of the Kajol-SRK pairing five years after My Name Is Khan was supposed to be this film’s USP. As it turns, it is the film’s OSP – only selling point.

Shah Rukh in Dilwale plays a gangster in Bulgaria called Raj Randhir Bakshi a.k.a. Kaali. Between shootouts and car chases during the course of his underworld activities, he meets Meera Dev Malik (Kajol) and they fall in love. A tragedy causes them to split up. When the film opens, the story has fast forwarded to the present in Goa where Raj runs a car modification workshop with his younger brother Veer (Varun Dhawan) who, at some point, falls in love with a pretty restaurateur called Ishita (Kriti Sanon). As you can imagine, circumstances cause Meera to return to Raj’s life.

Dilwale’s primary characters are surrounded by a bunch of comedians who are occasionally amusing (Mukesh Tiwari and Pankaj Tripathi are hilarious in a scene in which they try to cover up Raj’s past in the face of Veer’s probing questions) but mostly not.

Varun is sweet but really needs to give that cutesy dialogue delivery a rest. Kriti is given little to do, which is a pity because she has a striking, intelligent screen presence and was perhaps the only one worth watching in Tiger Shroff’s debut film Heropanti.

Even the songs by Pritam are, for the most part, a damp squib. The music director redeems himself though with Gerua (in Arijit Singh & Antara Mitra’s voices) from which Amar Mohile borrows several bars for his background score. Both serve to play up the SRK-Kajol hotness to searing effect.

SRK himself is magnetic and charming as the older Raj. He should seriously consider keeping that beard forever. Kajol is radiant, pretty and, with much less screen time than the hero, effective, though she should seriously consider junking those awkward high heels in future. It also feels sad to see how much she has whitened her skin from what it was when she began her career (he seems to have done likewise, though to a lesser extent).

There is not much in the writing of Dilwale that could help these two recreate the sparks that flew between them in their earlier films, but they do radiate warmth for each other, a warmth that wafts off the screen and floats about the air in a sigh-inducing fashion. Each time Shah Rukh and Kajol are together in a frame, you can almost forgive Dilwale for everything else that it ought to have been but is not.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	165 minutes

This review has also been published on firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/dilwale-review-even-shah-rukh-kajol-chemistry-cannot-save-this-disappointingly-boring-film-2552178.html

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/DilwaleTheFilm