REVIEW 778: BAMFAAD

Release date:	April 10, 2020
Director:	Ranjan Chandel
Cast:	Aditya Rawal, Shalini Pandey, Vijay Varma,  Shivam Mishra, Jatin Sarna, Sana Amin Sheikh, Kokab Fareed, Priyank Tiwari
Language:	Hindi

A college-going ruffian in Allahabad operates on a short fuse. He is loyal to his friends, takes on those who cross swords with them, longs to meet the city’s crime-kingpin-cum-political-influencer and falls for a pretty stranger. Nasir Jamaal’s misdemeanours lead to a more grievous act when circumstances are manipulated by an individual who is well-acquainted with the young man’s combustible nature.

Director Ranjan Chandel’s Bamfaad (Explosion/Explosive) stays with Nasir’s battle for survival when life spirals out of control, beyond anything his bravado and a fist fight can fix.

Chandel has co-written this story, screenplay and dialogues with Hanzalah Shahid. The film, which is streaming on Zee5 from today, has already drawn some attention because it is presented by Anurag Kashyap (who Chandel earlier assisted), serves as a debut platform for the son of veteran actors Swaroop Sampat and Paresh Rawal (Aditya Rawal plays Nasir) and is the first Hindi film starring Shalini Pandey who made her big-screen debut in the nationally debated Telugu hit Arjun Reddy (2017).

True to its title, Bamfaad has a fiery start. The striking introduction melds realism, humour and an earthy song. You know it has emerged from the Anurag Kashyap School of Filmmaking when, in the opening minutes in the background, singer Vishal Mishra belts out that exuberant, mischievously worded title track (music: Mishra himself, lyrics: Raj Shekhar). You know the film has been designed as a showcase for Rawal Junior when, during the course of that number, the screen is given over entirely to his lithe frame moving towards the camera as he emerges from a darkened space into the light, a device Bollywood uses only when it sees an actor as larger-than-life-hero material.

Whether Rawal will live up to that expectation is a question for crystal-ball gazers. What can be said for sure is that in Bamfaad he reveals himself to be a natural actor with solid potential. His physique is also a pleasant change from the steady stream of star sons flowing out of Bollywood in the past decade, whose bulging muscles and soulless yet perfect dancing have borne such a strong resemblance to each other that they have come across as clones assembled in the same lab. Rawal is no clone. No way.

The women in Bamfaad’s storyline are secondary players, and Pandey’s Neelam is no different. She is efficient in the role of a quietly assertive woman, but lacks a spark.

The stand-out performers in the cast are Vijay Varma playing a criminal named Jigar Fareedi, and Jatin Sarna as Nasir’s friend.

The first half of Bamfaad is pacey and interesting. Prashant Pillai’s background score is intelligently utilised and the songs are slipped smoothly into the narrative. The big twist in Nasir’s journey is deftly edited and directed, and leaves in its wake considerable suspense over what will happen next.

Sadly, the second half of Bamfaad does not live up to the promise of the pre-interval portion. After that mid-point drama, the writing wears thin. There are two nice turns, both involving policemen, but nothing so exciting as to make the film stand out from the other crime sagas that have populated the Hindi filmverse for two decades now.

Maybe things would have been different if we had never seen Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989), Ram Gopal Varma’s pathbreaking Satya (1998) and Company (2002), or the best of Kashyap and others that came next. Maybe too things would have been different if the past two decades had not brought with them so many memorable visits to small towns and small-town romances in Uttar Pradesh. Anyone following in those footsteps needs to conjure up something truly unusual, inventive and extraordinary to pass muster. Bamfaad works up to a point, but not further.

The writing of the characters’ motivations and their relationships requires more depth, the bows to Allahabad and its culture are sparse, and post-interval it feels as if the director mistook limited energy for a naturalistic storytelling style. 

Still, Hanzalah Shahid and Ranjan Chandel are talents to watch out for. For one, in this era of stereotype-ridden, Islamophobic Bollywood rants like Padmaavat, Kesari, Kalank and Tanhaji, it is nice to see a film in which the protagonist is a Muslim, but is not given any stereotypical markers of the religion, and members of the community are treated as regular humans: some good, some not, some evil, some not.

This is not to suggest that Bamfaad avoids a political comment on the present real-life context in which it has been released. The film does reference the danger looming over Hindu-Muslim equations in today’s India, although that is not a primary theme.

Besides, how can one not make note of artists who can conceptualise a scene in which a love-lorn youth gazing at the object of his affection tells her that pimples look good on her face? He does not say “even pimples”, he simply says “pimples”. Oh the sweet innocence of those words! Because of course on her they are an adornment, not a skin eruption – “that dress looks good on you”, “the new hairstyle looks good on you”, “pimples look good on you”.

Bamfaad is not quite the explosion it was meant to be, but it has its merits and its moments and is an engaging watch.

Rating (out of 5 stars): 2.5

Running time:

102 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bamfaad-movie-review-aditya-rawal-makes-his-mark-in-an-engaging-even-if-generic-crime-and-love-saga-8247841.html

Poster courtesy: Zee5

REVIEW 776: BAAGHI 3

Release date:	March 6, 2020
Director:	Ahmed Khan
Cast:	Tiger Shroff, Riteish Deshmukh, Shraddha Kapoor, Ankita Lokhande, Vijay Varma, Jaideep Ahlawat, Jackie Shroff, Satish Kaushik, Virendra Saxena
Language:	Hindi

Yes Tiger Shroff fans, he does take off his shirt in Baaghi 3. Unlike some Bollywood films of the past decade in which male stars have stripped off their tops for no apparent reason right before a big fight, here an excuse to display that ripped torso is written into the script: the hero’s shirt catches fire so he has to tear it off to save himself. 

With such tweaks and touches does Baaghi 3 convince itself that it is different from the templated ventures in which Shroff has been acting since his fists exploded on screen in 2014’s Heropanti. Clarification: it is not. 

Baaghi 3 is a remake of the Tamil film Vettai (The Hunt), which starred Arya as the omnipotent brother of a cowardly policeman played by R. Madhavan. Team Baaghi’s poor attitude to quality is confirmed once and for all when the closing credits announce that Vettai was a Telugu film. I suppose because Tamil, Telugu = saaaauth = Madrasi? Ki farak painda? Same same, no?  

Anyway, in the Hindi version, Shroff plays Ronnie Chaturvedi who has been aggressively protective of his elder brother Vikram since they were kids. Their father once exhorted Ronnie to forever take care of Vikram who has always been a cowering kitten. When they grow up, Ronnie encourages his sibling to become a policeman, hoping that the uniform will give him a sense of self-worth. Until that happens, one bhai bashes up gangsters of every shade in Agra on behalf of his policeman bhai who then takes the credit. 

In Vettai, the brothers’ area of operation was Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu, but since gang wars in a single Indian city are small change for Shroff I guess, Baaghi 3 travels to Syria where the story becomes about – as the trailer has already grandly informed us – “one man against the whole country”. 

The foray into Syria is a departure from the post-2014 trend in Bollywood of demonising Muslims to cash in on rising off-screen Islamophobia. Unlike Kesari, which distorted history to fit this narrative, and unlike Kalank, which was selective in its account of Partition for the very same reason, Baaghi 3 makes an overt, clumsy attempt to state that Indian Muslims are not villains, that Indians and Pakistanis are bhai-bhai, and that we are all helpless victims of demons from the Middle East.

One of the many problems with this line though is that you can hardly hope to counter the din of prevailing Islamophobia with a new round of stereotyping and with immature writing in a film whose primary purpose is not this anyway, but to show off its special effects, its action choreography and Mister Shroff in all his well-muscled, topless glory. 

Of course Baaghi 3 does not have the intellectual depth to take the conversation further either, to ask why the word terrorist in our country is habitually applied to those killing in the name of Islam and never to those who organised the mobs that murdered and raped Sikhs in Delhi in 1984, Muslims in Gujarat 2002 and Christians in Odisha in 2008. A counter to Islamophobia can come only from the thoughtful writing of films like Raazi and Gully Boy in which Muslims are portrayed as normal human beings of all hues – good, evil and the in-betweens. 

If “nuance” were the last word left on Earth, you could not apply it to Baaghi 3. Well-intentioned, loud, gory, clichéd – yes. Nuanced – absolutely not. And to be fair, director Ahmed Khan makes no such promise. Nor did the trailer, which makes his intentions clear with this juvenile tagline: “Whack smack attack, never look back.” 

Farhad Samji, who has written Baaghi 3’s screenplay and dialogues, initially gives characters a few bombastic, rhyming lines of the sort that were once common – and often fun – in commercial Hindi cinema, but that have become boring with decades of over-use. Ronnie gets this one: “Mujhpe aati toh main chhod deta, mere bhai pe aati toh main phod deta hoon.” And this one: “Jo uniform pehenta hai, voh hamesha form mein rehta hai.” And Vikram’s senior is saddled with, “Yeh gaadenge jhanda, jo sambhaal nahin sakte danda,” because Vikram is clumsy with the baton in his arms. (Sorry, non-Hindi speakers, I am not making the effort to translate those lines for you.) This formulaic element is dispensed with early on though, as the leading man’s action skills, his naked torso, fisticuffs, bombs, flying cars, helicopters and tanks take centre stage. 

Shroff’s body looks intimidatingly muscular in Baaghi 3 – and that is my sole comment on his acting in this review. 

Riteish Deshmukh as Vikram over-acts less here than he did in the insufferable Marjaavaan last year, which is sad, because he actually does deserve better than such films. 

Disha Patani in Baaghi 3

Women hang around on the margins of Baaghi 3 to look pretty, to love, be loved and protected by the men, to occasionally dance and wear tiny clothes. Towards this end, Shraddha Kapoor has been cast as Ronnie’s girlfriend Siya whose carefully constructed wavy hair does not get mussed up even during a string of terror attacks in Syria. And Disha Patani makes an appearance swaying in her underwear to a boring song called Do You Love Me?. If I did, I swear, lady, I would have fallen out of love with you by the end of that drab number. 

Along the way, the wonderful Jaideep Ahlawat from Gangs of Wasseypur and Raazi turns up to make no impression at all as an Indian gangsta called IPL (short for Inder Paheli Lamba...ooh, so clever). Vijay Varma, who has proved his fabulousness in Pink and Monsoon Shootout among other films, is wasted in the role of a clownish, good-hearted Pakistani. And Israeli actor Jameel Khoury gets to play a game of terrorist-terrorist as a certain Abu Jalal Gaza, mastermind of a certain Jaish e Lashkar. 

How can any actor’s performance be justly assessed in a film in which a murderous terrorist generously gives Ronnie a break in the middle of a battle unto death, so that little bro can look moony-eyed at big bro and have an emotional conversation?

Everyone and everything in Baaghi 3 is incidental though in the face of the film’s determination to foreground Shroff’s nimbleness. I was reduced to a gawking, envious, emotional mess when I saw his legs stretch out at a 180-degree angle in mid-air as he leapt out of (or towards, I have forgotten which) a flying helicopter. Even that scene, however, could not beat the split he performs to slide smoothly under a moving armoured tank and emerge on the other side. 

You can imagine how uninspiring the script is that despite all this high-adrenaline action, Baaghi 3 lacks fire. There is a scene in the film in which a wounded terrorist tells Abu Jalal Gaza: “We have not been attacked by America...or Mossad. There is only one man looking for Vikram.” Aiyyo. To use that very Indian English expression: too much!

It was bad enough that silly Vettai was inflicted on the world. Baaghi 3 is more ambitious than the original and ends up being worse.

Rating (out of 5 stars): 1.5

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	147 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/baaghi-3-movie-review-tiger-shroff-plays-tiger-shroff-in-a-tiger-shroff-film-8123901.html

Posters courtesy:

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baaghi_3

(2) https://www.facebook.com/DishaPatani/