Release date:
|
December 6, 2013
|
Director:
|
Prabhu Deva
|
Cast:
Language: |
Shahid
Kapoor, Sonu Sood, Sonakshi Sinha, Mukul Dev, Ashish Vidyarthi, Asrani,
Srihari
Hindi
|
Somewhere in a secret location between Mumbai and Chennai, there’s a factory that has mastered the assembly-line technique. The formula for the factory’s product is this: physically invincible hero (usually played by Akshay Kumar) + vulnerable heroine (almost always played by Sonakshi Sinha) + evil villain + lots of scenes in which the heroine is stalked by the hero or roughed up by the villain or both + loud songs + massive crowds of extras led by hero dancing to those songs + guest appearance by the rubber-spined Prabhu Deva in one of the songs + loud loud colours + litres of blood + shouting + humour interspersed with violence + one punch line that the hero repeats at regular intervals = a film!
Now here are instructions
for the factory workers this week: (1) Replace Akshay Kumar with Shahid Kapoor.
(2) In place of one villain have two. (3) Give Shahid’s character the grandiose
line, “Silent ho jaa varna main violent
ho jaaoonga.” (4) Check off the rest
of the items in the formula – Sonakshi, yawn, check… blood, yawn, check… Prabhu
Deva (also the film’s director), yawn, check… Ladies and gentlemen, here’s
presenting RAMBO RAJKUMAR!!!!!
Oh ya, that’s the old title
of R…Rajkumar. The name change was
reportedly forced on the makers by copyright issues. Wish they’d been legally
compelled to come up with at least one original thought for this project. For
whatever it’s worth, this is the story: Romeo Rajkumar (Kapoor) works for the
cocaine lord Shivraj (Sonu Sood) in Dhartipur village. He is assigned to kill
Shivraj’s rival Parmar (Ashish Vidyarthi) but is distracted by the discovery
that Chanda, the girl he ‘loves’, is the fellow’s niece. Chanda doesn’t care
for Rajkumar but it’s nothing that some good old Hindi-film-style stalking and roughing
up can’t fix. The damsel’s heart having been thus won, another impediment
surfaces when Shivraj also falls for her. What follows is lots of scheming,
screaming and bloodletting until the happily ever after.
I watched R…Rajkumar in a benumbed state of boredom because,
try though I did, I couldn’t find a single
element in it that we haven’t already seen in the gaudy-garish genre in recent
years. The film is so cliched that I
don’t even have the energy here to dwell at length on the many feminist
concerns it raises with the treatment of its heroine. It would be callous not
to raise one point though: there is nothing more disturbing in this film than
the passing scene of a corrupt police officer raping a woman who’s probably in
custody at his police station. We don’t actually see him in the act. The camera
in the adjoining room is aimed somewhere in the direction of the bars of an
open cell. On the floor we see a woman’s out-stretched arm and we hear her
cries. A phone rings, someone calls out to the policeman who emerges from the
cell in a dishevelled state while the woman continues to wail. In another film
this could have been a poignant moment. In R…Rajkumar
– a film which doesn’t display an iota of tenderness on any front, in which
the hero’s irritating and distasteful idea of wooing is to pucker up his lips
at every sight of the reluctant girl, which treats women as showpieces, in
which bosomy female humans appear out of nowhere to grind their hips and bulging
breasts to a song, in which the rape scene is just casually thrown in as if
designed to titillate the target audience, in which no context of sensitivity
is offered before or after that scene – it’s above and beyond offensive.
Any positives, did you ask?
Well, Kapoor looks cute and dances well as usual, he fights smoothly, is funny
in places and throws himself into the role with gusto, but what can actorly
zeal do in the face of such a trite screenplay? It’s tragic to see Vishal
Bhardwaj’s Guddu/Charlie from Kaminey reducing
himself to a Romeo Rajkumar. R…Rajkumar
has nothing new to offer even a fine actor like Sood whose Chhedi Singh in Dabangg was hilarious. No, it’s not good
enough that his bare torso is a sight to behold or that, as he helpfully
informs us, his upper arm has a wider circumference than Romeo Rajkumar’s
thigh. Sonakshi Sinha looks sweeter here than ever before, possibly because she
thankfully doesn’t repeatedly flash her profile at us in this film as she has
done in that trademark, painfully self-conscious fashion in all her films so
far. She clearly has comic abilities worth tapping, but persists in wasting herself on formulaic films in which women characters are particularly poorly written and
the heroine is a prize to be won by the hero or villain. In the midst of the
dialoguebaazi by all the characters, she too has a scene in which she gets to
yell “khamosh!!!” in a bow to her famous
daddy, but it ends up being a decidedly unfunny moment in a film filled with
un-funny-ness, repetitiveness, bombast and noise.
In the first half hour it
does seem like R…Rajkumar might
actually offer that blend of humour and action that made Dabangg an enjoyable experience. It fizzles out though as the film becomes
gradually indistinguishable from Rowdy Rathore, Khiladi 786, Boss and others that have emerged from
the factory. What exactly is the
difference? I’ve already forgotten!
Rating (out of five): *
CBFC Rating (India):
|
U/A
|
Running time:
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2 hours 27 minutes
|
