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Movie Review: Adipurush (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

This is a review of the Hindi version of Adipurush streaming on Netflix.

Adipurush reaches for the stars and falls well short, resulting in a film that looks bad and feels slow.

I acknowledge that I am not the target audience for Adipurush. The film opens with an onscreen note explaining that it is a devotional work, with the Hindu faithful as the presumptive audience for this retelling of a portion of the epic Ramayana. I’m familiar with the tale of Sita’s abduction by Ravana and her rescue by Rama, but the version presented in Adipurush is told somewhat out of sequence, with the assumption that everyone watching already knows all the details about this story, as well as Hindu cosmology more generally. Also, all of the characters go by aliases in the film.

That said, my issues with Adipurush have to do with the film’s execution, and not a misunderstanding of the material.

Prabhas plays Raghava, a prince who lives in the jungle in exile with his wife Janaki (Kriti Sanon) and his brother Shesh (Sunny Singh). The demoness Shurpanakha (Tejaswini Pandit) is enamored of Raghava, but he spurns her. She returns to the kingdom of Lanka and convinces her brother Lankesh (Saif Ali Khan) — king of the demons and a giant with many heads — to kidnap Janaki. Lankesh succeeds through trickery, forcing Raghava to seek aid from a race of forest-dwelling ape-men called the Vanara in order to get Janaki back.

Stylistically, Adipurush is a mashup of Lord of the Rings, Baahubali, and the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. Lanka and its castle look like Sauron’s fortress in Mordor, complete with trolls manning the gates. Fanciful elements like a swan boat call back to Baahubali. The Vanara look like they could be Caesar’s long-lost cousins.

But Adipurush doesn’t come close to matching the quality of the movies that serve as its inspiration. Writer-director Om Raut tries to execute his vision on such a grand scale that the visual effects can’t keep up. Instead of having dozens of creepy bats or specters that look cool, he opts for hundreds of bats and specters that look bad. Rather than ask his VFX team to animate hundreds of ape warriors with enough texture to look believable, he has them animate tens of thousands that look like low-budget cartoons.

The onscreen human actors don’t feel as though they are operating within a real physical environment, and practical effects are rarely used. There’s some kind of filter or post-production treatment done to Prabhas’s face that makes him look like a cartoon. It’s distracting because none of the other human actors are given such treatment (though it would be hard to tell with Shesh because Singh uses only one facial expression throughout the entire film).

Visual shortcomings might be overlooked if the story was told at a fast pace, but Raut loves slow motion. The characters often move in slow motion, giving the audience plenty of time to linger on the subpar visuals while being bored stiff. This pacing hinders what Prabhas can do with his performance. Same goes for Sanon, to a lesser degree. She does get a few good scenes with Khan, who takes advantage of the chance to play a larger-than-life villain and seems to enjoy himself.

Given that Adipurush presently ranks as one of the most expensive Indian movies of all time, the quality of the finished product is underwhelming. In order to execute his vision given whatever constraints he was working under, Raut would have been more successful making an animated movie. Better that than a live-action film that looks cartoonish.

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Movie Review: Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan (“Someone’s Brother, Someone’s Lover“) is strictly for Salman Khan fans — but even they might want to give this one a pass.

Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan (KKBKKJ, henceforth) is an unofficial remake of the 2014 Tamil film Veeram, which was a big enough box office success to prompt remakes in Telugu and Kannada as well. Khan plays Bhaijaan, the protector of a neighborhood in Delhi and adoptive brother to three younger guys whom he rescued from an orphanage fire when they were little kids.

The film is dense with references meant to signal to Khan’s hardcore fans. This includes nods to his earlier movies and famous roles as well as allusions to his personal life, such as Bhaijaan’s name (one of Khan’s many nicknames) and his bachelor status. Even Bhaijaan’s entry in which he is summoned by the whistles of his brothers and neighbors encourages Khan’s rowdiest fans to do the same upon seeing their hero for the first time.

Bhaijaan’s brothers are all in romantic relationships but don’t want to ask his permission to marry until they’ve found a partner for him as well. Enter Bhagya (Pooja Hegde, who is undeniably charming in this), a beautiful woman visiting Delhi from her home in Telangana. She is inexplicably smitten by Bhaijaan, and the brothers get to work trying to get them together. The film just ignores that Khan is 25 years older than Hedge.

Bhagya’s budding romance with Bhaijaan is interrupted by Mahavir (Vijender Singh), a crooked politician who wants to redevelop Bhaijaan’s neighborhood. But he’s not the only one who’s put the lovers in his crosshairs. In one of the more convoluted, nonsensical subplots I’ve ever seen, there’s a drug dealer named Nageshwar (Jagapathi Babu) who wants to kill Bhagya to get revenge on her brother Balakrishna (Venkatesh) for telling the cops to arrest Nageshwar’s dad who ran a coffee company whose trucks Nageshwar was secretly using to transport drugs, causing Nageshwar’s dad to have a heart attack and die.

KKBKKJ could’ve settled for being just dumb and harmless. But the filmmakers couldn’t resist making a couple of immature homophobic jokes. And Mahavir has a Black bodyguard who appears in one short scene solely so that Bhaijaan can say of Mahavir, “At least he’s not racist”–only for the camera to immediately cut to the bodyguard as monkey sound effects play. The movie clumsily acknowledges that racism exists, and then is super-racist itself!

The movie is also extremely violent, but it tries to seem less violent than it actually is. On three occasions, characters hallucinate being on the receiving end of brutality, including an entire family being shot to death in slow motion. Only after the gruesome sequences end are we shown that the events were not real, just imagined.

That outcome is certainly better for the characters who imagine them, but the audience is still subjected to witnessing the violence. While it may not be real, I’m not convinced that seeing such gory deaths is harmless. And we’re certainly not better off for it. If those violent scenes have no bearing on the plot, then why must they be there? Was there no other way to generate a spectacle besides watching people have their necks snapped? KKBKKJ is the last place to look for answers to such questions.

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Movie Review: IB71 (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

IB71 is a spy drama with no intrigue. Characters have access to so much information that there’s no sense of mystery, and obstacles are manufactured in silly ways. It’s a forgettable movie that feels designed to be forgotten.

Vidyut Jammwal chose IB71 to be his first film as a producer. He stars as an Indian spy named Dev. It’s late 1970, and Dev and his fellow intelligence officers are monitoring multiple threats. There’s unrest in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and Pakistan and China plan to use that as pretext to take over India’s North Eastern Region. To do so, Pakistan would have to fly its military planes over Indian airspace to reach East Pakistan — an action India is powerless to stop without a formal declaration of war.

However, Dev thinks they might be able to trick Pakistan into committing an act of war, thereby allowing India to close its airspace. The intelligence bureau knows that separatists in Kashmir plan to hijack a plane in order to draw international attention to their cause. If India can get the separatists to hijack a plane of the Indian government’s choosing — one full of Indian spies, including Dev — they can trick the hijackers into landing in Pakistan and pin the blame on their neighbor to the west.

This plan gets rolling very early in the film thanks to India’s spy network already having access to all the relevant information. When there’s actual spying to be done, it’s goofy. Dev and his partner Sangram (Suvrat Joshi) make it very obvious that they are tailing one of the prospective hijackers in a Kashmiri town that seems like it only has a couple dozen residents, yet the guy being followed never notices them. When a Pakistani spy named Sikander (Danny Sura) needs to report to his superiors, his phone is out of service. He drives for hours to report in person instead of just finding another working phone.

Jammwal is renowned martial artist, but IB71 only has two major fight scenes. One scene is shot in a hallway during a blackout, so it’s hard to see what’s happening. In the other, Dev and the other characters wear baggy winter garb that obscure their movements. Jammwal’s fight scenes are usually the highlight of his films, but these feel utilitarian.

If Jammwal opted to get into production to expand his body of work beyond action films, IB71 was a poor choice because it offers him little to do acting-wise, despite his being onscreen almost the whole time. Dev appears to have no connections to anyone outside of work. His relationship with his partner Sangram is the closest we get to anything resembling friendship. Unfortunately, Sangram’s wife is pregnant, which bodes about as well for Sangram’s survival odds as if he were two days from retirement. Yet even that relationship lacks emotional impact.

IB71 feels so flat because the only emotion that matters in this kind of pro-India historical film is uncritical patriotism. The same problem plagued Mission Majnu earlier this year, but the main character in that movie had a wife, which raised the stakes for him and created internal conflict. Dev has nothing to choose between, since his life revolves entirely around his job. If he died, would anyone besides his co-workers even notice?

On top of that, the film is so pro-India that there’s a total mismatch between the countries involved. There was never a chance that Pakistan was going to achieve its goals, what with its unreliable telephone network and inferior pop music (something Dev scolds a Pakistani soldier about while in disguise). With the outcome telegraphed from the beginning and no emotional hook to the story, there isn’t much reason to watch IB71.

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Movie Review: Tiku Weds Sheru (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Tiku Weds Sheru is a disjointed collection of scenes attempting to serve as a skewering of Hindi-film culture and the obstacles put in the way of outsiders. As a satire, it falls flat.

Sheru (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a part-time background actor who aspires to stardom. He blew a bunch of money to make an independent movie that never happened, and his main job as a pimp doesn’t pay enough to get him out of debt. Sheru jumps at the chance to marry a woman whose family offers a lot of money to any suitor willing to take on an “ill-tempered” bride.

The only time the bride in question, Tiku (newcomer Avneet Kaur), shows her temper is when she realizes her family is trying to marry her to a man almost 30 years her senior. (Kaur is 21, Siddiqui is 49.) The price she pays for objecting is to be slapped by her brother and beaten with a belt. She agrees to the marriage in order to get away from her abusive family and to be closer to her Mumbai-based boyfriend.

The boyfriend bails when Tiku learns that she’s pregnant. Her attempt to run away results in Sheru slapping her as well before deciding to get out of the pimping business and raise Tiku’s baby as his own.

What kind of straitlaced job does Sheru get instead? Drug dealing. All the while, he lies to Tiku and pretends to be a film financier who’s temporarily a little short on cash.

There’s probably an internal logic to why the characters act the way they do and why certain actions follow one another, but only writer-director Sai Kabir understands what that internal logic is.* This was a problem with his 2014 film Revolver Rani, too. Kabir doesn’t give his audience a reason to get invested in his characters, and there’s no real moral to the story. Is this satire or just messy people in a messy situation doing messy things?

Some of the disjointedness comes from what is likely a case of reverse engineering on Kabir’s part. It feels as though he wanted to include certain scenes in the movie and came up with the narrative justification for them later, regardless if that justification makes sense. Take for example the climax, in which Sheru appears in drag to rescue Tiku during a stage performance. Sheru’s convoluted explanation for his costume is that a certain gay politician (who hit on Sheru earlier) will be in attendance, so naturally he’d rather watch men perform, hence Sheru must appear in drag in order to get the politician’s attention. Huh?

Even individual scenes are choppy and hard to follow. The frequent, fast edits during a Latin dance number are so disorienting that the scene should’ve been left out of the movie entirely.

Tiku Weds Sheru is the first production by Manikarnika Films, the company established by Kangana Ranaut (who starred in Kabir’s Revolver Rani). Ranaut has often touted her outsider status within the Hindi-film industry, so Tiku Weds Sheru is certainly supposed to offer some kind of critique of the industry. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have anything coherent to say.

*If this article at Bollywood Hungama is to be believed, Sai Kabir may not be solely responsible for Tiku Weds Sheru‘s quality problems. Multiple sources told Bollywood Hungama that Kangana Ranaut rewrote and reorganized much of the screenplay, resulting in a film that Kabir wasn’t happy with. This would not be the first time Ranaut interfered with her director.

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Movie Review: Gumraah (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

Gumraah is what happens when filmmakers decide that continuity is too much work.

Aditya Roy Kapur plays both Arjun and Sooraj, a pair of lookalikes who are accused of murder. Only one of them is the killer, and it’s up to the police to figure out which one of them it is.

The story starts promisingly. We see the murder of a 30-something tech guy named Aakash (Aditya Lal) and even get a glimpse of the killer. Special investigator Shivani Mathur (Mrunal Thakur) is assigned to the case, to the annoyance of the local police department. When Shivani finds a photo that clearly shows the killer’s face as he leaves Aakash’s bungalow, Assistant Commissioner of Police Dhiru Yadav is overjoyed. The killer is Arjun Sehgal (Kapur), an architect Dhiru has had a personal grudge against for years. It seems like an open-and-shut case until Sooraj Rana (also Kapur) is brought in for drunk driving, and the cops realize there’s no way to tell Sooraj and Arjun apart.

This is a good setup, with the lookalikes and their unknown connection to the dead man and to each other. Plus there’s the tension in the police station between Shivani and Dhiru, not to mention Dhiru’s vendetta against one of the suspects. Can’t wait to see what the cops uncover during their investigation, right?

Wrong. The words “3 Months Earlier” appear on screen, and we get flashbacks to Arjun romancing a woman named Jahnvi (Vedika Pinto) and Sooraj gambling, drinking, and partying with white women (the surest sign that he’s a degenerate).

This cut to the past feels so jarring because it’s not clear who is flashing back. It doesn’t occur because one of the characters is reminiscing or explaining information to the police. It happens because it’s the simplest way for director Vardhan Ketkar (from a screenplay by Aseem Arora and Magizh Thirumeni) to do character establishment without keeping track of details that might conflict with the present-day storyline.

It’s extra lazy because the police are going to interrogate both of the suspects about alibis and motives, and they’re going to interview witnesses and acquaintances of those involved in the crime. All of this background information could have been revealed organically through the course of the police investigation.

Relying on clunky flashbacks does two things. It centers the story on Arjun and Sooraj — and more specifically on the actor playing them. The characters themselves are not that interesting, and Kapur doesn’t do anything in his performance to differentiate them. Second, it neuters the impact the police officers — specifically Shivani — have on the story. This is especially weird because the film is edited to give Shivani a lot of stone-faced reaction shots, visually indicating that she’s supposed to play a more important role in the story than she actually does. She can hardly be considered a co-lead, despite appearing on the film’s poster.

Even when the police investigation takes center stage, the story isn’t allowed to develop organically. Supporting characters are conjured solely to advance the plot, disappearing into the ether once they’ve outlived their convenience. Mystery fans will be disappointed because all the truly important information is saved for a last-minute revelation, meaning there’s no point in trying to guess who the killer is beforehand. With such awful pacing, Gumraah‘s resolution feels manufactured, not inevitable.

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Movie Review: Mission Majnu (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Not much thought went into Mission Majnu, but the filmmakers probably figured they didn’t need to bother. Slap together a bunch of cliches from the historical patriotic genre playbook that’s so popular in Bollywood right now, and voilà! — Mission Majnu.

The film kicks off its spy story with a soapy romance set in mid-1970s Pakistan. Humble tailor Tariq (Sidharth Malhotra) falls for a stunningly gorgeous, blind woman Nasreen (Rashmika Mandanna). They get married over the objections of her father, who owns a garment shop that makes military uniforms and therefore knows just how little Tariq earns. Nevertheless, love prevails.

Little do Nasreen and her father know that Tariq is actually Amandeep Singh — an Indian spy who’s been living in Pakistan for an indeterminate period of time. We know very little about Tariq/Amandeep other than his father was a traitor, and so the son became a spy as a kind of penance for Dad’s misdeeds. His instructor at the academy R.N. Kao (Parmeet Sethi) — who serves for a time as India’s RAW chief — says Amandeep was the best student he’d ever had.

Amandeep is tasked with finding out information about Pakistan’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program. The film opens by saying that Pakistan started developing nukes in response to losing the war with India in 1971, painting Pakistan as over-reactionary sore losers. Moments later, the narrator clarifies that actually, Pakistan didn’t start its nuclear program until after India tested its first nuclear weapon in 1974 with Operation Smiling Buddha.

This is par for the course in Mission Majnu. India’s actions are always justified even when they are problematic, and any politicians who think about engaging in diplomacy with Pakistan are naïve wimps. Likewise, Pakistan is portrayed as fundamentally deceitful, and their sweets aren’t as good as Indian sweets. No level of insult is too petty.

With a viewpoint rooted in such simplistic nationalism, there can be no question as where Amandeep’s loyalties lie. Duty to country obviously has to win. There’s no tension or moral conflict regarding his marriage to Nasreen, unlike the emotional tug-of-war the main character faces in the much better historical spy drama Raazi (which came out back when movies with political nuance were still acceptable).

Nasreen isn’t much of a character. As written, she exists to give a Amandeep a reason to be emotionally conflicted (even though he’s not), but to never get in his way. Nasreen is perpetually smiling and supportive, grateful that someone was willing to marry her despite her blindness. She’s aware that her husband keeps secrets from her but she doesn’t press him about it, despite the enormous cost she (unknowingly) pays for those secrets.

Any intrigue in the story happens at a national level. Israel is just as worried about Pakistan developing a nuclear weapon as India and has its own spies on the case. But if Israel is mistaken about where the test is happening and bombs the wrong site, India will be on the receiving end of retaliation from Pakistan. Therefore, it’s imperative that India’s spies — which include Aslam (Sharib Hashmi) and Raman Singh (Kumud Mishra) in addition to Amandeep — get the correct location. But even this crisis is handled in a cheesy manor, with imminent destruction being averted just as a countdown from ten reaches one.

Malhotra is quite hammy in Mission Majnu. He plays up his “aw shucks” simple tailor act while goading Pakistan’s generals into bragging about the nuke program, then furrowing his brow and looking concerned when they divulge useful intelligence — as though they wouldn’t notice his abrupt change in demeanor mid-conversation. When Raman Singh shaves his beard and ditches the Muslim scholar garb he’s been wearing for ten years, no one in town cares. And don’t get me started on Aslam’s ridiculous method for reaching for a phone when assassins are after him.

Mission Majnu was cobbled together from tropes and cliches we’ve seen a million times before. Give the movie about as much thought as the filmmakers did — none at all.

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Movie Review: Govinda Naam Mera (2022)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Watching Govinda Naam Mera feels like watching a video played backwards. Writer-director Shashank Khaitan started with the outcome he wanted, then engineered his story in reverse to achieve that end amidst a series of shocking revelations. But when you play the story forward, you find that the biggest reveals of all are an inscrutable plot and characters that never engender sympathy.

The title character is played by Vicky Kaushal, who projects far more charisma than the movie deserves. Govinda is a wannabe choreographer and background dancer living in large home bequeathed to him by his father — who ditched his first wife and son to marry Govinda’s mom, Asha (Renuka Shahane). Govinda is married to Gauri (Bhumi Pednekar), a woman who hates him as much as he hates her. His dance partner Suku (Kiara Advani) is also his mistress.

Several axes hang over Govinda’s head, though there’s no timeline as to when any of them will fall. Suku wants Govinda to divorce Gauri, but Gauri won’t agree until he repays her dowry money. Govinda owes money to a cop from whom he illegally bought a gun, for some reason. And Govinda’s stepbrother Vishnu is about to win a lawsuit that will force Govinda to relinquish rights to his house, leaving him homeless and penniless. Then Govinda gets involved with a drug dealer, further complicating matters.

As the story proceeds, characters act in ways that suit neither their personalities nor the situation. Just as the audience reaches a maximum level of confusion, a card appears on screen reading something like “3 Days Earlier.” This happens over and over again — as though the point of the story structure is to trick the audience.

Because we don’t see the events in sequence, there is no tension or ambiguity about the outcome. We only ever learn the truth of characters plans after they’ve succeeded (or not). It also means we don’t get to see relationships between the characters develop. We only get the “ta-da!” reveal that people were working together all along, but not how such cooperation changed their relationship.

The worst example of a story element that exists solely for the reveal is Govinda’s mom. The audience learns early in the film that she’s not really partially paralyzed and in need of a wheelchair, but is faking it all to garner sympathy. Yet she’s been doing it for fifteen years! There’s no story reason for her to perform this long con (and make her own life more difficult), except to shock other characters when she eventually reveals the truth.

One of the selling points of Govinda Naam Mera is the chance to watch Kaushal and Advani dance together. Their performances in that regard do not disappoint. But save yourself a bunch of time and trouble and just watch this YouTube playlist of songs from the movie.

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Movie Review: Heropanti 2 (2022)

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Entertainment Factor: 3.5 Stars (out of 4)
Quality Factor: 1 Star

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This review is a tribute to Dr. Julia Bulgaria, the star of Heropanti 2. She’s a veterinarian who wears a sash that reads “Prom Queen” over her cleavage-baring lab coat. She utters the line, “There’s a zombie party down the road,” with a straight face. Her name is DR. JULIA BULGARIA!

Heropanti 2 — which has nothing to do with the original Heropanti from 2014 — is an objectively bad movie. But Dr. Julia Bulgaria (Amber Doig-Thorne), flamboyant feather jackets, and Tara Sutaria’s casual champagne-tossing all play their part in making Heropanti 2 so bad it’s good.

Even before my new hero Dr. Bulgaria appears, the movie gives plenty of warning that it exists in a parallel universe where normal rules do not apply. The story opens with the villain Laila (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, whose commitment to his bonkers performance is unimpeachable) interrupting a magic show that he is performing in order to meet with his crew of henchmen. Laila’s plan is to steal all the money from every bank account in India on Tax Day. Laila stabs a guy to death while wearing a suit jacket with feathers on the shoulders and a bedazzled eagle on the back. Lesson? Don’t mess with a guy with such outrageous fashion sense.

Cut to Tiger Shroff, who plays a nerd named RJ. He wears glasses and suspenders and rides a bicycle throughout the Yorkshire town where he lives.

By this point, if you think this movie is not for you, cut your losses and move on. It’s doesn’t get any better.

RJ runs into Inaaya (Tara Sutaria) — England’s youngest self-made billionaire. How’d she get rich? “By making a game.” Inaaya thinks RJ is her ex-boyfriend Babloo, who ran off more than a year ago. And wouldn’t you know it, she’s right! “RJ” is really Babloo: a genius hacker who’s been in hiding after double-crossing Laila — who is Inaaya’s brother!!

With Babloo’s cover blown, Laila’s men track him down. Cue the acrobatic fight sequences — the whole reason anyone watches a Tiger Shroff movie. Babloo flips over cars and swings around poles, with the occasional assist from Inaaya.

During a pause in the fighting, Inaaya does something inexplicable and hilarious. She seductively offers Babloo a glass of champagne, pours a glass for herself, then — instead of setting the bottle down on the table behind her — casually tosses the bottle to the side as if she was tossing her jacket onto a chair. Off camera, we hear the sound of glass breaking. Now there is broken glass and champagne all over the floor! Why did she think that was a good idea? Such reckless insanity makes me love Inaaya — though not as much as I love Dr. Julia Bulgaria.

The sexy veterinarian enters the picture when Babloo and Inaaya flee to the countryside in search of a doctor to remove a bullet from Babloo’s behind. Babloo’s butt is so muscular that bullets cause only minor damage to it, allowing him to dance at the aforementioned “zombie party down the road” immediately after surgery. Dr. Bulgaria’s high level of skill also plays a part, no doubt.

For all its faults, Heropanti 2 pulls out all — well, most — of the stops to make its action sequences and dance numbers visually interesting. Not that they’re all good, but they are made with good-faith attempts at grandness. Tiger Shroff is a very good dancer, and Tara Sutaria is even better, so their performances hit the mark. A. R. Rahman’s soundtrack is inconsistent, with catchy tunes like “Miss Hairan” and boring slogs like “Dafa Kar” (the zombie party song).

Nothing about the story makes a lick of sense, and a plot structure that bounces around in time doesn’t help. Yet everything is so over-the-top silly that inconsistency doesn’t really matter. If whatever the hell it is that Heropanti 2 is doing works for you, you’ll have a great time. I did.

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Movie Review: Dybbuk (2021)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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There’s a temptation to look for symbolism or thematic parallels in Dybbuk. Don’t bother.

Writer-director Jay K — who also wrote and directed Ezra, the Malayalam film on which Dybbuk is based — introduces potential themes and subplots that should be relevant but ultimately are not. As I describe the plot, I’ll put an asterisk (*) next to each theme that goes nowhere.

Married couple Sam (Emraan Hashmi) and Mahi (Nikita Dutta) are moving from Mumbai to Mauritius for Sam’s new job. Mahi worries about leaving her support system*, but Sam assures her she’ll be fine. Besides, her parents have never accepted their marriage since she’s Hindu and he’s Christian*.

They arrive at their colonial-era mansion in Mauritius, which comes complete with a suspicious maid* and an attic full of creepy junk*. Sam gets busy at his new job trying to turn Mauritius into a dumping ground for European nuclear waste*. His uncle, Father Gabriel (Denzil Smith), calls to ask how Mahi is coping with the move, especially after her recent miscarriage*.

Mahi shops at an antique store, which looks surprisingly tidy for a place that was the scene of a violent murder of possibly supernatural origins days earlier. She buys an obviously cursed box — part of a collection belonging to a deceased Jewish scholar — takes it home and opens it. Trouble ensues.

The symbolism of opening the box could have paralleled any of the dead-end plot points highlighted above in order to explore a particular theme: commonalities across faiths in times of spiritual crisis; the danger of putting work before personal relationships; how partners respond differently to a miscarriage; the threat of environmental catastrophe; continuing efforts by wealthy countries to exploit their former colonies (perhaps with the mansion being itself a cursed symbol of colonial oppression); etc.

Dybbuk isn’t about any of that. It’s just about a mean ghost. The rules governing how the ghost operates are flexible and dependent upon bits of information dropped into the story without setup. When asked why Sam and Mahi are so unfortunate as to be the ghost’s victims, Father Gabriel says, “There’s no logical explanations for these things.”

If Sam and Mahi were a happy couple, Father Gabriel’s explanation might be fine. But Jay K introduces these points of potential conflict to give the impression that there’s more to the story than just supernatural hijinks, when there isn’t.

For Dybbuk to have any depth or subtext, characters would have to have meaningful conversations with one another about more than just the mechanics of exorcising a ghost. After Mahi becomes pregnant again, she and Sam don’t talk about her feelings or fears given her past miscarriage. If they aren’t going to discuss the specific emotional trauma that comes from miscarriage, why make it a plot point?

Emotional depth isn’t possible in a story where Mahi is hardly a character in her own right. She exists to trigger the supernatural crisis and to give Sam someone to worry about. With a better script (and better direction of the mostly expressionless actors), Dybbuk could have been about something. Shame that it isn’t.

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Movie Review: Bhuj — The Pride of India (2021)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Before writing, directing, and producing Bhuj: The Pride of India, Abhishek Dudhaiya directed over 1,000 TV episodes. Perhaps that’s why Bhuj‘s story feels like it would have been better served as a miniseries. Dudhaiya focuses so narrowly on action sequences and requisite patriotic war drama plot points that the film lacks emotional resonance.

Dudhaiya’s screenplay is based on real-life events from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, when Pakistani bombers destroyed the airstrip at Bhuj Air Force Base. Commanding Officer Vijay Karnik enlisted the help of 300 villagers to rebuild the strip and make it operational again. Other important characters are based on real people as well.

After a brief recap of the events leading up to the war, the story begins with Pakistani leaders devising a plan to distract India’s attention from the fighting in East Pakistan by attacking India’s western border. On December 8, 1971, warplanes from West Pakistan bombard the airstrip at Bhuj. Amidst smoke and explosions, Commanding Officer Vijay Karnik (Ajay Devgn) himself mans anti-aircraft guns to repel the attack, as many of his subordinate soldiers lie wounded around him.

Leading with such a visually dramatic scene isn’t an uncommon screenwriting choice, but it puts Dudhaiya in a bind. By December 8, Pakistan’s bombing of Western military sites had already been underway for several days, forcing the screenplay to flash back to earlier attacks in order to introduce other characters and locations important to the story. There are flashbacks within flashbacks to give characters backstory that further confuse the sequence of events.

Vijay’s storyline has a scene from December 3 — the day Pakistan first started its bombing campaign — that makes a more sensible opener. Vijay and his wife Usha (Pranitha Subhash) celebrate their wedding anniversary at a party with all the base’s officers and their families. Everyone dances, unaware that Pakistani jets are speeding toward them. As the romantic song “Hanjugam” ends, bombs fall on the adjacent airfield, sending civilians scrambling for cover and soldiers running to their posts. The scene establishes the camaraderie among the soldiers at the base and shows us who Vijay is trying to protect.

Sadly, sense of place and character motivation are low on Dudhaiya’s priority list. Other major characters like fighter pilot Vikram Singh Baj (Ammy Virk), Army scout Ranchordas Pagi (Sanjay Dutt), and Army officer Nair (Sharad Kelkar) — tasked to hold a strategic base with too few soldiers — get about 30 seconds of backstory each. At least Sonakshi Sinha’s village leader Sunderben kills a CGI leopard, while spy Heena Rehman (Nora Fatehi) gets a full training montage.

These are all characters that would have benefited from a longer series format, rather than a two-hour movie. Heena’s story is particularly ripe for exploration. She became a mole for India in order to avenge the death of her spy brother at the hands of Pakistani military intelligence head Mohammad Hussain Omani (Pawan Shankar). Heena’s assignment requires her to act as Omani’s girlfriend. How does she feel about having to sleep with the man who murdered her brother? Bhuj doesn’t ask. The only emotion characters are allowed to feel is patriotism.

The film’s priorities are action focused. Besides the bombings and air battles, there are a lot of hand-to-hand fight scenes. Pagi single-handedly kills about 100 men. The emphasis on individual physical prowess makes Bhuj blend in with other hero-centric Hindi films, like those where one honest man cleans up corruption by himself.

All of the action takes place without a sense of geography. Vijay needs to repair Bhuj’s airstrip so that Vikram can land a plane full of reinforcements from Jamnagar who will drive to Vighakot, the base that Nair and Pagi are trying to defend. There’s no sense of how far the bases are from each other, or how close Bhuj is to Sunderben’s village. Characters just show up wherever they need to be whenever they need to be there. Vikram miraculously crash lands within walking distance of his base after a dogfight with a Pakistani fighter plane.

Inscrutable geography is important, because Vijay has less than 24 hours to repair the airstrip. Though onscreen titles consistently show the location name and date when the scene changes, they don’t show the time. There is a ticking clock, but the audience can’t see it.

In real-life, repairs to the airstrip took three days. Adding that to the fact that Pakistani’s bombing campaign lasted over a week reinforces that Bhuj would have made a better series — especially in the hands of a director with no feature film experience but solid TV chops.

Links

  • Bhuj: The Pride of India at Wikipedia
  • Bhuj: The Pride of India at IMDb