Shubhra Gupta

Shivam Pandit, the straggly-haired shooter with a golden heart, is back. And it would seem, miraculously, that nothing much has changed between the 2007 Awarapan and this sequel, which doesn’t stray far from the thematic palette of the original, keeping the lead actor intact. It’s yesterday once more. Emraan Hashmi is clearly older. But his hair is as straggly. He is as much a wounded hero, a role Hashmi owns, as he was back in the day. And he is as lethal, which is a good thing because he is up against a new set of mobsters, gun-toting henchmen, helpless young women, as he goes about looking for a little girl in the clutches of a gang of human traffickers.

Reacher fans, rejoice. I’m delighted to report that Season 4 of the one and only Jack No Middle Name Reacher, which has him up against a formidable pair of enemies, is a humdinger. Based on ‘Gone Tomorrow’, Lee Child’s 13th novel featuring Reacher, it begins in a Philadelphia subway in which a woman kills herself. It catapults our hero, busy minding his business till someone makes it their business, into a breakneck adventure involving an assortment of characters, including bent cops, incompetent CIA agents, evasive US presidential candidates, and sundry others, all looking desperately for a missing pen-drive. What’s so important on that drive that it needs to be found at all costs? How is it connected to congressman John Samson (Marc Blucas) and his fiercely protective wife (Kathleen Robertson)? What is it that two women from Indonesia, the attractive Lila Hoth (Agnez Mo) and her mother, Amisha (Anggun) are searching for? Why are people being killed in the most ghastly manner, with dismembered corpses strewn all over the place?

Kids and dogs are an irresistible combination. Ohh My Dog gives us, yes, dogs with their undying love and loyalty, which make you remember a time when Indian cinema made films which children could watch with delight. In an Assam village, Apu (Maahi Rai) discovers his beloved Momo has gone missing. Both the distraught boy and his mother (Geeta Aggarwal Sharma) go to the local cop-station to file a complaint. A policeman (Vijay Mishra) is finally moved by Apu’s distress and swings into action, but he is too slow for the smart kid with sharp sleuth instincts (a nice Satyajit Ray-Feluda touch there), who begins tracking his beloved Momo with the help of his teacher (Sulakhyana Baruah).

How much courage is required to strap yourself into a lean mean machine and take off into the air, flying at supersonic speeds, zero-ing in on a target with snap-shot judgement which will make the difference between life and death, defeat and victory? The best war films deliver those moments, where the viewer and the man in the hot seat are breathing together, in their attempt to seek and find and destroy: the handsomely-mounted, solidly-executed Operation Safed Sagar gives us all of the above — combat pilots risking their lives with a smile, families living with bated breath and eternal optimism, and the men on the ground taking those tough calls, win or lose.

A three-way modern romance set in a small town. That’s the pitchline of Musafir Cafe, based on a novel of the same name by Divya Prakash Dubey, created by Sharanya Rajgopal and directed by Ruchir Arun, and the eight-part show takes the memo very seriously indeed. Chander and Sudha — someone here is evidently a fan of Dharamveer Bharati’s classic novel of the same name — meet and ignite in Bhopal. Having quit his software job in the US, he works in a dull government office, nursing a dream of opening his own cafe in the hills, while meeting suitable girls with a view to marriage.

A film made four years back, releasing only now, suddenly feels current. Mention of protests and placards woven into the plot around an unravelling couple makes you feel that it’s reflecting the times we are passing through. But then, who is to say that thorny relationships and problem-ridden times aren’t the story of us, decade upon decade? Max (Siddharth Menon) and Min (Medha Shankr), a pair whose relationship is heading south, find themselves connecting over their cat. Or is it just the handsome creature that draws Min back to Max, especially when things aren’t quite as smooth with the new man in her life? The feelings are relatable: if you’ve been together for a while, parting is never easy, and could perhaps encompass residual warmth alongside resentment and sadness.

This seven part series reminds me a little of Maamla Legal Hai, the show set in a lower Delhi court in a part of the national Capital far away from the swag and smoothness of Central Delhi. Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya functions in the same mould: this is a sarkari school in the fictional mohalla of Tinki Toli, whose students come from a certain section of society, with parents working low rung jobs, whose only way out of the rut is education.

What does an honest, idealistic lawyer, successful enough to own a sea-facing flat in Mumbai, do when faced with the prospect of defending a man charged with the grievous assault of a young woman? The face off between won’t-defend-the-indefensible Arjun Mehra (Sunny Deol) and entitled rich jerk Shauryaman Gaur (Akshaye Khanna) is your standard battle between the good guy vs the bad guy. Left to himself, Arjun wouldn’t touch Shaurya with a bargepole, but here, the writers try and finesse it, by forcing the former into the latter’s corner, by coming up with a you-can’t-be-serious crutch. But we are asked to roll with it, because it is that kind of film; truth being stranger than fiction, and all that.