Release date:
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April 25, 2014
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Director:
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Sai Kabir Shrivastav
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Cast:
Language:
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Kangna Ranaut,
Vir Das, Piyush Mishra, Zakir Hussain
Hindi
|
What does a hard-core
carnivore do when deprived of meat to tear into with its canines? I haven’t a
clue. But I can tell you what a good actress does when deprived of a
well-written role to sink her teeth into. In Kangna Ranaut’s case, she tries
her darnedest best and ends up being a skeleton of a character, seething with
potential for the well-fleshed-out person she might have played instead. That,
in a nutshell, is the primary problem with Ranaut’s latest film.
Revolver Rani is set in Madhya Pradesh where an evil female don called
Alka Singh (Ranaut) has just lost an election in Gwalior to Udaybhan Singh
a.k.a. Bhanu Bhaiyya (Zakir Husain). She openly accuses him of taking a Rs 200
crore bribe from the evil Siddhantha Group of industries to evict poor tribals
from their land. In a bid to finish her off, Bhanu decides to target her
Achilles heel, her boyfriend the Bollywood star Rohan (Vir Das).
The film features chases and
shootouts galore, abductions and seductions, kitschy sets, searing barbs directed
at the news media and netas, a forced
circumcision, and numerous standalone entertaining elements begging to be
strung together impactfully into a cohesive, hard-hitting whole. Sadly, writer-director
Sai Kabir Shrivastav seems not to have the chops to hold it all together, and
what we get is a shadow of what-might-have-been.
Imagine the potential of a story
in which Alka meets Rohan at a male beauty contest in Gwalior sponsored by an
undie brand, with banners screaming Crazy Underwear Chambal Dud (they mean
“dude”) No. 1. Imagine what could have been done with scenes in which the country
bumpkin Alka reveals her own studded crazy underwear purchased from Bhainiss in
Italy. There are plenty of hilarious or potentially hilarious scenes in Revolver Rani: the dialogues soaked in
local lingo are unrelentingly amusing; a TV anchor plays a sort of sutradhar, spouting bad poetry,
distorted film lyrics and dialogues to fit every news situation; Ranaut herself
sustains a killer accent whenever she speaks English; and two sidey buffoon politicians
with a boiling hatred for Alka had me guffawing every time they opened their
mouths. Problem is that each of the main characters – Alka’s in particular –
ends up feeling like a cardboard cutout rather than a real flesh-and-blood person,
like a neat one-line concept that the writer failed to effectively expand. Alka
is neither an all-out caricature of a female gangster nor is she all-out
menacing nor is she a smooth blend of both.
Despite the film’s indifferent
writing, even in its present form it’s likely to have been far more effective
if it weren’t for the terrible sound design. There is no clarity in the
speaking or singing voices here. Sound effects, songs and background score have
all been allowed to clash throughout. In fact, the entire film seems to feature
weak sounds crowded together.
I’ve seen hundreds of films
at the multiplex where I watched Revolver
Rani, but still, to confirm that the complex’s usually stable sound system had not taken a vacation
on this particular day and to confirm that I wasn’t imagining RR’s audio issues, I stayed back to watch
another film in the same hall within that multiplex immediately after my show
of Revolver Rani. That second film
was perfectly okay, so the problem must lie with RR alone.
Ranaut is still soaking in
the universal praise for her performance in Vikas Bahl’s Queen. Her Alka in Revolver
Rani is proof that even the best actors are only as good as the directors
and writers they work with. She gets the swagger and the rest of the body
language right, though in the absence of writing heft, after a while it feels
like she’s posing around for still photographs rather than inhabiting a role. She’s
well-suited to the film’s larger-than-life action scenes of the sort usually
given only to male stars. Her eccentric wardrobe complements the package. She
hits the bull’s eye with her dialogue delivery, especially of those baby-ko-tension-hoga lines about which I won’t reveal anything further here. By the
end of the film though, I knew nothing about her beyond what I had learnt at
the start: that her hard exterior belies the softness inside. Besides, the film’s
impact is diluted by the manner in which it keeps straying away from her,
especially in the second half.
The usually brilliant Piyush
Mishra plays Alka’s mentor, Balli Mama, about whom we get to know little
despite the considerable screen time given to him. Vir Das has his moments as
Rohan, most especially in a scene in which he’s mock dancing while trying to
talk to her, but those moments are few and far between. Besides, it’s never
clear how Alka is so blind to his open disinterest, even revulsion towards her.
Considering that the film is
clearly positioning itself as a sort of feminist farce taking apart the usually-male-dominated
underworld genre, it’s disappointing to see it then succumb to stereotypical
notions of how motherhood impacts a woman. Worse, it turns out that this
hard-nosed, hard-headed gangsta chick estimates her entire self-worth on her inability
to have babies. This is not to say that a woman in
real life won’t be pained at the social derision aimed at her for being a “baanjh”,
that crude Hindi word for a childless woman. Problem is that there is not a
single voice in this film to pooh-pooh these clichés!
Revolver Rani is co-produced by Tigmanshu Dhulia, director of Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster and Paan Singh Tomar. Wish Dhulia had taken
Sai Kabir’s basic concept, but chosen to script and direct this film himself. As
things stand, Revolver Rani has many wonderful
moments and ideas, but as a whole it’s neither satirical enough nor farcical
enough nor intense enough nor thrilling enough to be what it seems to want to
be. It’s not the cracker of a film that it could have been. Despite all its
pluses, what it ends up being instead, is a damb squib.
Rating
(out of five stars): **1/2
CBFC Rating (India):
|
U/A
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Running time:
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133 minutes
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Visuals courtesy: Effective Communication,
Raindrop Media
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