Shubhra Gupta

I’m just done binge-watching seven episodes of Special Ops 2, each lasting about 50-57 minutes, and I’m here to tell you that this one is a banger. Most sequels flatten and disappoint. Special Ops came in 2020, when we were in the midst of the pandemic; five years later, where much has changed in the media landscape, and part twos are where creativity goes to die, I’m most pleasantly surprised that this sequel, again co-directed by Neeraj Pandey and Shivam Nair, and written by creator Pandey, Deepak Kingrani, Benazir Ali Fida, has exceeded my expectations. We have finally got ourselves a spy franchise that is globally ambitious in the way it goes about laying out its wares, dropping in and out of political hot-spots casually, bunging in enough lol moments: what’s the point of a spymeister who can’t just say, ‘hamare pass CIA waalon ke liye kuchch hai,’ and his faithful dogsbody coming up with just a teeny detail that has the Langley HQ in Virginia salivating.

The way you will respond to a film which goes down a much less beaten path in Bollywood — placing a young woman with autism at the centre of the narrative — will depend upon a couple of things. Your ability to suspend disbelief, and how much, or how little, you know about the condition, which Tanvi (Shubhangi Dutt) lives with. Only the most curmudgeonly will refuse to smile back at Tanvi when she decides on the impossible: join the Indian Army, and salute the flag at the stunningly beautiful, formidably out-of-reach Siachen outpost. It was her father’s (Karan Tacker) dream, and now that he isn’t in this world, she makes it her mission. Will her bemused grandfather, retired Army man Col Raina (Anupam Kher) help her, or hinder her?

What happens when a middle-aged Sanskrit teacher who has never had the pleasure of female company, forget about physical intimacy, is given a glimpse of heaven? At long last, something he never thought was possible, is within his grasp: a gorgeous younger woman is interested in him. Is it for real? Is there a catch? There’s promise in the premise. Relationship dramas are really where plots can dance around humans and their impulses, and actors can dig into nuance. The thing with Aap Jaisa Koi is that the surprise element is never given the kind of free reign that would lift the material.

On May 21, 1991, a blast in Sriperumbudur decimated Rajiv Gandhi, as he bent to receive a garland from an eager woman who had inveigled herself into the receiving line. The hunt for the killers occupied frenzied column inches in the press as well as a special investigation team (SIT), as they examined the fragments of bone and body gathered from the site, well-trampled upon by shell-shocked survivors, and morbid bystanders. In one of those miraculous breakthroughs that helped track the assassins, a Chinon camera was found intact in the jumble of bloody clothing fragments and footwear. It had captured a series of telling images, and the investigators got their first lead, which eventually led them to uncover the plot hatched by a group of LTTE militants who blamed the former prime minister (Rajiv Kumar) for sending Indian forces into Sri Lanka which they believed was anti-Eelam, a movement born to form a Tamil state in the island nation.

Kaalidhar lives with two younger brothers, the older one’s wife, and a sister. He is one of those hapless people who are tolerated until they are useful, and when that comes to an end, a Kumbh mela visit becomes the route for a heartless abandonment. The film is a copy of the Tamil original K D, with some culture-specific differences built in for changes in location and language, starting with the fact that Abhishek Bachchan’s Kaalidhar is more middle-aged than straight-up old. That his child-like innocence and lack of guile could be the result of a medical infirmity, as much as his own nature is left for us to judge: his hands shake, his gait is not very firm, and he looks lost more often than not, unless he’s wolfing his favourite dish, a heaped plate of biryani. Eight-year-old Ballu (Daivik Baghela), a street-smart survivor, comes to his rescue. He’s an orphan, also abandoned by his folks as a baby. He has enough rudimentary education, gleaned from a kindly teacher who uses chalk-and-talk and a blackboard under a village tree, to get by. From now on, Ballu declares to a bemused Kaalidhar, you will be known as K D, even if by acknowledging the abbreviated form, nothing changes.

It stands to reason that Metro In Dino will have thematic similarities with its spiritual predecessor Life… In A Metro: warring couples, predatory bosses, commitment-phobic men, confused women, straying and returning, sacrifice and recompense. It also has straight-up reprises. Konkona Sen Sharma, whose pairing with Irrfan was one of the highlights of the original, is the only one from the previous cast making a return, with Pankaj Tripathi standing in for the late, great actor; and the three-member band, led by Pritam, is strewn all over the film, like it was in the earlier iteration. In the interim– eighteen years is a long time—so much has changed. Those clunky cell-phones, which a couple of characters used in the earlier film, have changed to the sleek oblongs everyone carries these days, with laptops, tablets, and an overuse of every other device that promises connection, but provides only disconnection. You don’t need an empty flat with a key, the idea borrowed from Billy Wilder’s classic The Apartment, to plan an assignation; you can just create a profile on a dating app and get right down to sexting, even if you choose to call it Linger, rather than Tinder.

Do not mess with a mother. She can go to any extent to save her family. Mixing mythology and technology, ‘Maa’ presents Kajol as a contemporary woman fighting with all her might to keep at bay the dark forces targeting her young daughter. Ambika (Kajol) and Shuvankar (Indraneil Sengupta) have succeeded in keeping his family’s troubled history from the artistically-inclined Shweta (Kherin Sharma). But the 12-year-old’s constant curiosity coupled with a tragic incident leads the mother and daughter to travel to their ancestral haveli in Chandrapur in the Bengal countryside, where time seems to have come to a stand-still.

An insensitive, full-of-himself basketball coach, suspended from his job, finds himself doing community service: in three months he has to shape a group of young adults, largely with Down’s Syndrome, into a team that is capable of participating in tournaments. Based on the 2018 Spanish film Campeones, ‘Sitaare Zameen Par’ adopts the original’s determinedly cheery vein to win its matches; in the process, it also wins our hearts. Gulshan (Aamir Khan) is the guy with an attitude problem, and he uses it to make everyone around him unhappy. His wife Sunita (Genelia d’Souza) wants a baby. He doesn’t. His senior coach wants compliance. Gulshan behaves badly. A drunk driving incident leads him, reluctance and truculence firmly in place, to a vocational centre for people with special needs. Here he encounters a group of spirited youngsters who challenge his idea of ‘yeh bechaare bachche’: Satbir, Guddu, Bantu, Hargovind, Sharmaji, Lotus, Raju, Kareem, Sunil, Golu are all young people with specific personality quirks which go beyond their facial Down’s distinctiveness, often unclear vocalisation and other limitations which are part of the autism spectrum. These are young people who have a sense of self, and fun: slowly but surely, Gulshan finds himself being drawn into their circle, and what started as a punishment becomes pure affection.