Jaat

The smartest thing that Himesh Reshammiya has probably done in his professional life, besides transitioning from composer to singer, is to embrace the inherent ridiculousness of his stage persona. For the longest time, he seemed entirely unaware. He’d perform bicep curls to his own love songs on Instagram, seemingly oblivious to how meme pages were responding. But something changed after Janhvi Kapoor went on Koffee with Karan and essentially pulled the curtain on what was maybe the greatest inside-joke of our times. Two years down the line, Reshammiya is starring in a movie called Badass Ravikumar and going on a ‘Cap Tour’ of sold-out live shows. It’s genius. If only Sunny Deol had the same self-awareness in Jaat.

“Yeh dhai kilo ka haath hai, is ki taakat North dekh chuka hai, ab South bhi dekhega.” The reference to Sunny Deol’s iconic dialogue is more than obvious, as is the North-South alchemy. ‘Jaat’ marks the Hindi film debut of Telugu director Gopichand Malineni and encashes upon Deol’s stardom in its inimitable southern style. Only, the actioner that builds on Deol’s ‘post Gadar 2’ starry status amplifies it many times over. Undeniably, Sunny Bhaji is once again a one-man army who can stop a vehicle with one hand and bash up dozens and dozens of muscle men; in short, do all things unimaginable, but very much possible in this Dharam-putar line of action. Instead of uprooting a hand-pump, pillars and fans become his weapons of mass destruction.

Jaat marks the directorial debut of Gopichand Malineni, who has primarily worked in Telugu cinema, blending the characteristics of a North Indian hero with southern elements. In this action film, Sunny Deol portrays an angry old man capable of single-handedly confronting and defeating an army of villains. It has been nearly twenty-five years since he famously uprooted a hand pump to vanquish his foes; this time, he utilizes a ceiling fan, a wooden column, and other unconventional objects as weapons. At one point, he proclaims, “Yeh dhai kilo haath ko awaaz North sun chuka hain ab South sunega“ (The sound of these two-and-a-half-kilo hands has been heard in the North; now the South will hear it) This film is a quintessential action movie that could be classified as a ‘masala film’; however, the masala genre typically does not include scenes of decapitation. In some instances, heads are tossed into someone’s hands, while in others, headless bodies are seen moving about, raising questions about the medical plausibility of such scenarios, where men walk akin to a headless chicken. Many acclaimed action films, such as Pulp Fiction, feature blood and gore but often with stylized action choreography. In contrast, this film relies heavily on sickles and swords to sever body parts, to the extent that the censor board had to pixelate several graphic scenes.

Will Sunny Deol—or the makers of any film starring him—ever move past the overused ‘Yeh dhai kilo ka haath’ (this two and a half kilo hand) line of dialogue from the 1993 film Damini? Clearly not, because writer-director Gopichand Malineni revives it once again it as a front-bencher-pleasing proclamation in the Hindi language action drama Jaat, headlined by Deol. Famed in the North, Deol’s character Baldev Pratap Singh declares that it is now time the south gets acquainted with his legendary and destructive hand.

Sunny Deol comes out of memes this week, demanding an apology from naysayers. Taking a break from the western front, the original one-man army fires a salvo on the Coromandel coast. When Bollywood takes a break from Muslim terrorists, it reincarnates Ravan to take on the hero. A decade after Shah Rukh Khan rode on Chennai Express, Sunny gets on to a saffronised Ayodhya Express with the thumping chants of Jai Shri Ram playing in the background to take on Ranatunga, a fierce antagonist from Sri Lanka who is ruling a landmass in coastal Andhra with the help of a corrupt system. Sunny’s father, Dharmendra, uprooted many such Hukumat up north in the 1980s. With the Hindi heartland increasingly becoming out of bounds for mainstream commercial cinema to situate tales of a politician-criminal nexus, Sunny recycles the formula, flexes muscles down South, and shows that even in his 60s, he is the real bulldozer.