Uday Bhatia

Ajay Devgn isn’t the worst star-actor in Hindi films today, but he’s the most boring. Nowadays he tends to play unflappable types who either take on powerful adversaries or have to get their families out of a jam. And he does so in such a dour, bland way that you have to wonder if he gets any joy out of acting anymore. There’s a moment at the end of Raid 2 when his character’s carefully laid plans have come off perfectly. But Devgn’s face says, I’m tired and vaguely annoyed. You’ll be tired and vaguely annoyed by the end of Raid 2, a film that badly needs an agile, alive performance at its centre. Devgn reprises the part of Indian Revenue Service officer Amay Patnaik from the first film (2018), which was also directed by Raj Kumar Gupta. I’d written then: “The qualities that (presumably) make Patnaik such an excellent officer are the same ones that make him a taxing movie lead.” This is still the case, as Patnaik goes from posting to posting scowling and sighing at everyone else’s incompetence and greed.

Narendra Dubey (Emraan Hashmi) is getting his daughter ready for school. She’s reluctant to go; the ‘gun waale bhaiyya’ on the bus is scary, she says. Who would you rather have on the bus, her father asks with a smile. Santa Claus, the girl immediately replies. Later, when Narendra, the BSF’s top man in Srinagar, is asked why he risks his life, he says he hopes to fulfil this wish of his daughter’s. Tejas Prabha Vijay Deoskar’s Ground Zero opens its eyes—but only a little. It recognises that a child heading out every day with an armed soldier is scarring. Fair enough. But that girl, young though she is, must have some idea that the gun is there for her protection. Similarly, there must be a child in her class who sees the same guns every day. Even if, in her short life, they haven’t been pointed at her, she must instinctively know that they might be one day. This child Ground Zero doesn’t want to contemplate.

What we do in memes doesn’t echo in movies. Studios want their releases to go viral so badly they’ll try and reverse engineer such moments. But more often, the things that work are simple and unpredictable—like 10 seconds of Jaideep Ahlawat dancing. Everyone was delighted to see Ahlawat do his best Travolta in OAFF-Savera’s catchy ‘Jaadu’ from Jewel Thief. Netflix quickly cut a Jaideep-focused promo. It’ll bring a few curious viewers to the film, where they’ll discover Ahlawat plays a character so boringly reprehensible that by the time the song comes around in the end credits, no one wants to see him dance. Placing Jaideep Ahlawat and Saif Ali Khan in opposition is a good idea in theory: low-vibe grumbler versus high-vibe trickster. Rehan (Khan) is an internationally renowned jewel thief who’s been laying low. He’s hunted down in Budapest by his younger brother, who begs him to help out their father, with whom Rehan had a falling out. A thuggish art dealer, Rajan (Ahlawat), is blackmailing the retired doctor to get Rehan to Alibaug and help him rob a priceless jewel called the Red Sun. And there’s a detective, Vikram (Kunal Kapoor), who’s been trying to catch Rehan for years.

Little details tend to annoy when the broader experience is choppy. During the first half hour of Kesari Chapter 2, every musical choice had me scribbling notes. The generic sad song that plays over the end of the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh. The nu-metal that accompanies one of Akshay Kumar’s dramatic entries. The angelic chorus that practically announces the fate of an earnest young revolutionary. Jallianwala Bagh has been solemnly depicted in several Hindi films, most starkly in Sardar Udham (2021). More than 1500 people were killed in the 1919 massacre after General Dyer ordered army troops to fire on a crowd of civilians trapped in a garden. Though the British tried to suppress the details, enough pressure was built that they constituted the Hunter Commission to look into the matter. The committee condemned Dyer’s actions, but the Viceroy’s Executive Council opted not to prosecute.

Five skinny dudes turn up at the Alappuzha gym and announce that they want to learn boxing. The man at the desk says, that’ll be a thousand in advance, plus monthly fees. The boys murmur about not being able to afford it. Fine, the official says, how about 300? There’s a chorus of assent, but one of them hopefully asks, EMI? They say you shouldn’t put a hat on a hat, place a joke on top of another. Khalid Rahman’s Malayalam film Alappuzha Gymkhana is the exception to this rule. There are jokes within jokes, jokes appended to jokes, jokes hanging off other jokes like the last commuter on a packed bus. And it all works. This is a slacker comedy that’s works hard, a babbling stream of slapstick, non sequiturs, sight gags and general silliness. Along the way, it also manages to be a damn good boxing film.

Salman Khan can barely rouse himself to act anymore. Every director since Kabir Khan in Bajrangi Bhaijaan has had to work around the actor’s limitations, to coax brief flickers of star quality and hope the rest isn’t egregious. It can’t be easy for Khan’s fans to see him this way, complacent, over the hill, indulged and lied to. The paragraph you just read applies to Sikandar but wasn’t written with it in mind. Instead, I’ve taken a line each from my reviews of his last three solo releases: Radhe, Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan andTiger 3. You might say that’s lazy and unprofessional, but if Salman won’t make any effort, why should I? There’s only so many ways to say: it’s over, move on, stop embarrassing yourself. Sikandar begins with Sanjay Rajkot (Khan) thrashing a Mumbai politician’s son, whom he catches harassing a woman on a flight. We then learn that Sanjay and his wife, Saisri (Rashmika Mandanna), are the Rajkot royal family, philanthropic, benevolent and much loved by their people (the film is strangely nostalgic for ruler-subject relations). Sanjay—also called Sikandar, after Alexander the Great—has a trained militia on standby but never seems to need them, singlehandedly decimating goons sent on the orders of the aggrieved minister (Sathyaraj).

A movie becomes more violent the further it gets from movie violence. Movie violence insulates. It excites, titillates, comforts. It reassures audiences that what they’re seeing isn’t real and need not be taken too seriously. A realistic punch in the face registers more strongly than a hero sending half a dozen bodies flying through the air. Movie violence has no wish to distress or dismay, or to remind you of violence in the real world. The opening credits of Prithviraj Sukumaran’s L2: Empuraan, a sequel to his Lucifer (2019), show the burning of a train compartment with Hindu passengers in 2002, as had happened in Godhra, Gujarat that year. The sequence that follows shows the bloody reprisal, as Hindu mobs go on the rampage. It has the hallmarks of Indian movie violence—a truck barreling through a gate, sword-wielding goons leaping through the air, speed ramping, various things on fire—but the idea is to disturb and reckon with history. A group of Muslims offered shelter by a Hindu landowner are ambushed, sexually assaulted, burnt alive and otherwise brutally murdered. The reference to the Naroda Patiya massacre, in which 97 Muslims were killed in a day, is made clear by naming the chief perpetrator Baba Bajrangi (one of the actual accused was Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi).

Hindi cinema’s pathological obsession with Pakistan is so consistent that I just take it as a given now. Sometimes a film so virulent and stupid comes along—Gadar 2 (2023), Fighter (2024)—that it breaks the surface, but mostly it’s a lot of forgettable posturing and flag-waving. On some rare occasions, a film will introduce notes of doubt, or grace. I’ve come to expect it from Yash Raj’s action films, which treat cross-border matters with a strange mixture of cartoon villainy, human feeling and grudging respect. Sometimes it happens unexpectedly, like the recent war film Sky Force, which starts off strident but deescalates as it goes along.