Bharathi Pradhan

The camera globetrots. Budapest, Istanbul, Mumbai, London. Everybody’s cool. Rehan Roy (Saif Ali Khan), a fingersmith who’ll steal the necklace off your body or the mobile in your pocket with smart smoothness. A tad James Bondish too, the names of women in bed don’t matter. And he is the ultimate jewel thief, popular in the crime world as unmatched, unbeatable. Rajan Aulakh (Jaideep Ahlawat), the Page 3 rich man. So unflinching cool that the rottweiler he fed with his hands as a puppy gets a bullet in its forehead for cosying up to Rehan. So cool that he’ll watch a piece of art on his wall and admire its splosh of colour. It’s real dried blood of a human he’d strangled for tattling on his offshore accounts. Deficit of trust brings out the underworld gangster in him.

In a dark, bleak world, somebody lights a lamp. In the dock this time are not the British atrocities of the 19th century. It’s a centuries old slavery that Indians have practised against their own. Writer-director Ananth Narayan Mahadevan and dialogue writer Muazzam Beg paint a weary, dystopic India where no one smiles. Brahmins like Vinayak Deshpande (Joy Sengupta) and the Head Priest (Amit Behl) are always wound up and angry – the streets belong to them during the day, how dare the lower castes walk the same path as them and defile the area? English-educated Jyotiba Phule (Pratik Gandhi) whose father Govindrao (Vinay Pathak) got land from the British is moneyed. But every day is a confrontation with the upper caste.

For sure it’s a well-made film. It’s also well-intentioned as it tells the real-life story of BSF officer Narendra Dubey (played by Emraan Hashmi) who nabbed Ghazi Baba, India’s most wanted terrorist in the early 2000s. Between director Tejas Prabh Vijay Deoskar and camerawork by Kamaljeet Negi, the suddenness of a shot in the market that kills a BSF officer sipping tea, stuns the Force as much as the viewer. The rawness of the Kashmir valley in 2001 where stone pelting in the name of ‘azaadi’ and luring young boys to pick up pistols and shoot soldiers at random, is impactful. Writers Sanchit Gupta and Priyadarshee Srivastava equip Dubey with lines of zeal like, “Asli jeet” is not in taking the gun away from their hands, it’s in changing their thoughts, cleansing their minds of the hatred they harbour. Dubey also spouts ‘Aaj risk nahi liya toh kal sabke liye risky ho jayega’ every time he urges his men to act during a mission. It’s not the catchy line the writers probably intended it to be but it is expectedly thrown back at him at another time when his morale is low.

Once in a rare while, a film comes along that opens old wounds and corrects history so effectively that the revisit is worth much more than the price of your ticket. Director Karan Singh Tyagi’s retelling of The Case That Shook The Empire (authored by multi-faceted banker Raghu Palat and Pushpa Palat) which focuses on the courtroom brilliance of Indian lawyer C Sankaran Nair (Akshay Kumar) is one such piece of cinema which shrinks the once mighty Crown into a small-minded, genocidal brute, exemplified by General Reginald Dyer (Simon Paisley Day), aka the Butcher of Amritsar. Tyagi and co-writer Amritpal Singh Bindra take cinematic liberties with a true story but the outcome is an impactful court case that lays bare the bloodiness of the Baisakhi massacre.

The opening line that a ‘cell’ phone has 1 billion prisoners is substantiated by all that follows. The security guard of a high-rise is so ‘imprisoned’ by a cricket match on his cell phone that he barely notices a visitor putting his name down as ‘Virat Kohli’ in the register. Director Amit Golani is off to an energetic start as a lady comes out of the high-rise and a body comes hurtling down from the terrace. All you see is the splatter of blood on her as she screams. The tone is efficiently maintained as Pratyush Dua (Babil Khan) wakes up to do what every gizmo-reliant, tech-freaky youngster does – ignore calls from Mummy, get gadget ‘Aby-e’ to switch on/switch off the lights and turn on mood music while a robot cleans the house and he’s online all the time. Contactless food, friends whose numbers he doesn’t know by heart coz it’s all stored in one gadget, followers who mean everything to him, an entire life that’s inside his mobile phone. He’s even done the unforgivable with his dad when the parent came between Pratyush and his mobile phone.

Better than Sikandar. Not quite the ultimate compliment of this season but comparisons are inevitable. It’s almost as if someone studied the screenplay of Sikandar and sat down to correct everything that was wrong with it. We know it didn’t happen that way but storyteller and director Gopichand Malineni does score over southern colleague AR Murugadoss in at least four major departments. Topmost is that Gopichand delivers on his promise with punchy action, a department that could’ve somewhat salvaged the feeble Sikandar. When the unnamed Jaat hero (Sunny Deol whose name is revealed towards the end) starts off with a mild, “I was eating an idli, he pushed my plate, it fell to the ground. Sorry nahi bola,” and ends each such complaint with wild flying fists, the dhai kilo ka haath in full spate, there’s ceetee-podu energy. There are at least four such introductory scenes as the hero’s “Sorry bolo” moves up the chain from the lowest goon right up to the fierce Ranatunga (Randeep Hooda).

Throw a crore of rupees at Arjun (Siddharth) or a cricket ball, his eye will watch only the ball. Cricket before all else, before family, wife, even school-going son Adi or his own mother’s funeral. And now, he’s batting to save his place in the national team, he’s been in bad form for a couple of matches. Time to retire? The question every star cricketer dreads to hear from the board. Adi’s 30+ schoolteacher Kumudha (Nayanthara) has been warned that she cannot step beyond her duties and get personal with her students. Her obsession – to have a child of her own. The doctor’s told her that this will probably be her last attempt at an IVF procedure. She needs Rs 5 lakh for it. Kumudha’s husband Saravanan alias Sara (R. Madhavan), an MIT trained scientist with a dream project to save fuel. On the sly, will funnel Rs 50 lakh into his dream project, a Rs 50 lakh loan ostensibly taken to upgrade a canteen his late father-in-law had set up for the jobless genius. With the canteen shut and loan sharks at his throat, there’s Kumudha nagging him for Rs 5 lakh.

A privileged, entitled politician’s son (Prateik Smita Patil) has just shamed, blackmailed and attempted to molest a lady passenger when the famous blue bracelet appears out of the blue. It’s an energetic beginning with a touch of humour as Sanjay Rajkot (Salman Khan), also known as Sikandar and Raja Saab (yes, even in these times), thrashes the goon(s) while the air hostess announces turbulence. The man with the blue bracelet is charming too, when he asks the lady if she’s okay, in the midst of the fight scene. To refer to her past as closed and her little son as her future, gives a glimpse of contemporary chivalry. One wishes the same energy, the same today’s thought and the same sprinkling of wit had prevailed the rest of the way as outdated writer-director AR Murugadoss takes flights of fantasy to establish Sanjay/Sikandar/Raja Saab. A super wealthy “Rajkot Ka Raja” so large-hearted that the entire population will stand up to protect him, and no policeman dare touch him. One who sets out to arrest him for bashing up the minister’s son, has his jeep broken into pieces and he has to take the offer from smirking “Rani Sahiba” Saisri (Rashmika Mandanna) to use their private cars to return to the police station.