Bharathi Pradhan

A dozen years after Gangs of Wasseypur, Anurag Kashyap springs a surprise. A gangster film so engaging that despite juggling with different time zones requiring different looks and general chaos with daddies getting killed, there’s clarity in the characters, situations and stories. Along with co-writers Ranjan Chandel and Prasoon Mishra, Anurag threads them with professional efficiency into a neat narrative. Aided with some of the wackiest numbers and freshest, peppiest background scores heard in a long time. Musicians Manan Bhardwaj, Dhruv Ghanekar, Anurag Saikia, Aaishvary Thackeray, Nishikar Chhibber and Piyush Mishra may take a bow. Early morning Kanpur in 2006. A punctual “manager babu” buys his customary channa-poori at 7.30am. A guard outside a bank gets chatty with a customer who’s come in before opening hours. Soon, a botched-up bank robbery.

The weak-spined rivalry between Jagdish Tyagi (Arshad Warsi) and “client-chor” Jagdishwar Mishra (Akshay Kumar) evokes barely a smile. The ‘you-take-her’ volleying between them when a penniless Janki Amma (Seema Biswas) comes to them to file a petition against land-grabbing industrialist Haribhai Khaitan (Gajraj Rao) has no humour. Mishra’s banter with wife Pushpa (Huma Qureshi) which had such a spark in 2017 has fizzled out in the intervening years. The gymming, the dating app antics and tearing his hair in the courtroom don’t make Judge Sunder Lal Tripathi (Saurav Shukla) endearing at any point. A Valentine’s Day outing with lady cop Chanchal Chautala (Shilpa Shukla) might’ve been funny if it had ended with Judge Tripathi getting a long bill. But writer-director Subhash Kapoor must stretch it and explain that the Jollys had ‘topi pehnaoed’ him.

This time around, there’s no sex scandal rocking the Senguptas who’ve settled down in Mumbai. In fact, there is only the past that keeps popping up like a bad penny. But there is the addition of Narayani (Sonali Kulkarni), a true-blue Maharashtrian lady politician. Throwing the outsider card at opponent Rajiv Sengupta (Jisshu Sengupta), shaming him for his gay brother-in-law’s part at a Gay Pride gathering and enjoying a concert while her raid squads create a half-hearted upheaval at the Sengupta residence, Narayani is the clear vamp of electoral rivalry. It’s good old dirty politics (nothing new out there) that overtakes shame and scandal in the family.

There is a lot going for writer-director Umesh Shukla’s new film that strikes a quirky equation between Mamta Mishra (Divya Khossla Kumar) from the slums and suited-booted Abhishek Verma (Neil Nitin Mukesh). And take it from us, there’s nothing romantic going on between them. But what Mamta is all about doesn’t add up. She’s got a kid and a mother-in-law (Chhaya Kadam) who hits the bottle all the time. She’s got a job at the railways and moonlights as a waiter. And the three stay in a locked up little flat, leading the landlord on a merry chase. Along with writers Siddharth Goel, Jay Master, Deepak Nirman and Himanshu Tripathi, Umesh Shukla’s feel for comedy strikes from the first note. But the story really gets going when suave but sleazy Abhishek Verma who’s late for a meeting with a politician (Zakir Hussain), dumps his car that’s stuck in a traffic snarl, jumps into the metro and loses his mobile phone.

Mirai is no ordinary stick. It’s a divine staff, the use of which baffles rudderless young Super Yodha (Teja Sajja) who must dedicate his life to a mission where the Mirai will work its miracles and help him succeed. Writer-director-cinematographer Karthik Gattamneni goes time-trotting and globe-trotting. Hark back to the times of Emperor Ashoka, glimpse at Lord Rama and Hanuman. Also go futuristic with set action pieces overloaded with VFX. Move from the Himalayas, Varanasi, Morocco, Hyderabad and Japan to hidden temples, the Kumb Mela and faraway islands. The target is simple: Super Yodha must save the nine granths or scriptures from falling into the hands of Mahabir, a dark force (Manchu Manoj who must wear black). He has already misused his tantrik powers and gained even more strength from eight granths. Super Yodha must save the ninth.

Sequences that stun and performances that force a watch: The humiliation of CBI officer Shiva Pandit (Darshan Kumar) in Husseini House, on the orders of a weak-kneed senior (Puneet Issar). Contrast it with an earlier Zanjeer moment when Shiva crisply tells off Husseini’s goon that he hasn’t been given permission to sit. The dining table cool of criminal Sardar Husseini (Saswata Chatterjee) with elegant wife (Madalsa Sharma) playing gracious hostess, the underlying menace palpable. The goonga pagal (Mithun Chakraborty) as his story seeps out, a piercing moment when he helplessly tells Shiva that he can’t talk. Tongue cut off, castrated, yet the fire burns The public lynching of Gandhian Judge Banerjee (Priyanshu Chatterjee) even as he defines equality and justice while Ghulam (Namashi Chakraborty) kicks on mercilessly. The undying spirit of Chaudhry Kaku (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) in his guillotine moment at Noakhali when Ghulam demands, “Bol, Pakistan zindabad”.

A pamphlet from the Kerala Tourism department will mention

• Elephants
• Kalaripayattu
• Boat races
• Coconut trees
• Lungis
• Banana leaf meals
• Mohini Attam

Why director Tushar Jalota needed co-writers Gaurav Mishra and Aarsh Vora to tell the story of billionaire baap ka beta Param Sachdev (Sidharth Malhotra) and Sundari (Janhvi Kapoor) is curious for it doesn’t go beyond the tourism pamphlets of the scenic state. Ah, yes, what the pamphlets miss and Jalota gets is that God’s own country is unwelcoming of guests, calls their shorts chaddis and insists on a lungi. It’s called fun, in Jalota language. In a shrinking world where barriers between the North and the South have come down, alongside tech talk like apps, AI and algorithms, Jalota flies the Punjabi munda to Kerala who gapes at its culture and its people like he’s in a different galaxy. Param has used a new app to find his soulmate and there she is doing the Mohini Attam in her home stay. Soon, Sundari must give him the mandatory dressing down on how Kerala is different from Tamil Nadu like he’s been living in a North Indian cave.

This was the nadir YRF was fast plummeting to when Saiyaara lifted it temporarily. It’s a thud back to Thugs of Hindostan times. Around halftime, the thought was, so far so bad. But it got worse. We’d walked with a wolf, sparred in Japanese, fought an army of samurais, had car to car, bonnet to bonnet confrontations, travelled from Berlin to Delhi to the Somalian seas and the Himalayas, had coffee in Spain, got introduced to forced acronyms like MICE and LDBD, met Kaul (Anil Kapoor), the new RAW chief, saw Luthra (Ashutosh Rana) the old chief die with ‘India First’ on his lips, and we met Kabir (Hrithik Roshan), Vikram (NTR Jr) and Kavya (Kiara Advani) with ‘Aavan jaavan’ playing in the background. But, and it’s a big but, we hadn’t moved from where we’d begun.