Tag Archives: Prithviraj Sukumaran

Movie Review: Sarzameen (2025)

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0.5 Star (out of 4)

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Sarzameen marks the absurd nadir of Hindi terrorism dramas. Bollywood producers: please, give us a break.

In many ways, Sarzameen is no different from other recent terrorism movies. A shadowy organization intent on taking innocent lives forces a lone, hyper-competent soldier to choose between love and duty to his country. But the team behind Sarzameen — first-time feature director Kayoze Irani (actor Boman Irani’s son) and debutant screenwriters Soumil Shukla and Arun Singh — uses every genre trope in a way that exhibits zero understanding of how the audience will react. It’s like if you punched someone and expected them to thank you for it.

The super soldier in Sarzameen is Colonel Vijay Menon (Prithviraj Sukumaran). He’s the kind of guy who can take out dozens of heavily armed terrorists with just a pistol. Vijay’s wife Meher (Kajol) adores him, and his young teenage son Harman (Ronav Parihar) looks up to him.

Thing is, Vijay loathes his son. Timid Harman stutters when he speaks and gets beaten up for not being athletic, to Vijay’s mortal embarrassment.

Vijay gets a chance to show just how much he detests Harman when the boy is kidnapped. The group holding him wants to exchange the boy for two imprisoned terrorists, brothers Qaabil (K. C. Shankar) and Aabil (Rohed Khan). Vijay is convinced that Qaabil is an alias for the mastermind “Mohsin,” but someone claiming to be the real Mohsin offers to turn themselves in following the prisoner swap. Vijay is skeptical, but desperate Meher asks him, “What if you’re wrong?”

At the swap — which involves releasing the brothers into a shallow streambed while Harman is left elsewhere, out of sight — Vijay has flashbacks to his swearing-in ceremony as a young soldier. Overwhelmed by fears that he’s acting unpatriotically, Vijay starts shooting at the brothers as they walk away. Vijay kills Aabil, but Qaabil escapes. The Colonel returns home to Meher with a sad look on his face, having doomed their only child to death.

During every scene with Harman, Vijay behaves like a complete jerk. Vijay lets his son be killed not because of “patriotism” — which the film uses as a nebulous catch-all concept — but because of ego, cementing him as an all-time cinema a-hole. How Irani, Shukla, and Singh don’t see Vijay’s actions as irredeemable is the story’s biggest mystery. Vijay can’t come back from this — or it would take storytellers much more experienced than this trio to redeem him.

Yet, eight years later, Vijay gets his second chance. A young man rescued with other hostages says his name is Harman Vijay Singh (Ibrahim Ali Khan). Turns out Harman wasn’t killed, merely tortured for years while living with the terrorists. Of course Vijay doesn’t believe this is his son. This “Harman” does one-armed pushups and doesn’t stutter, so he must be a fake. Meher — who inexplicably stayed with Vijay after he supposedly got their son killed — can tell this is her son, and DNA proves it. Harman lives.

The acting in Sarzameen is generally not terrible. Khan seems bewildered as Harman, but that’s actually appropriate. Kajol is fine. Sukumaran doesn’t do anything to soften Vijay’s rough edges, but I’m not sure he could have salvaged things.

All of Sarzameen‘s problems stem from a story that cannot work as written. Genre clichés are thrown together in the service of too many plot twists. But there’s no substance behind any of it, no consideration given to character motivations. It’s a film about “patriotism,” but what do the filmmakers think patriotism means?

The filmmakers deliberately refuse to define the terrorists’ objectives, lest they accidentally portray them sympathetically. But, by making Vijay the world’s worst dad, they make the terrorist outfit look good by comparison. Qaabil is a supportive and nurturing leader, understanding the value of providing directionless young men with a place to belong. Contrast that with Vijay’s disappointment that Harman wasn’t born wielding a machine gun, not to mention Vijay’s commanding officer’s (Boman Irani in cameo) penchant for needlessly dangerous publicity stunts that put civilians at risk. Which outfit comes off looking better?

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Movie Review: Deva (2025)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Deva on Netflix

Director Rosshan Andrrews makes his Hindi-language debut with Deva, a remake of his 2013 Malayalam movie Mumbai Police. Screenwriting duo Bobby-Sanjay return to update their original script with a different climax, which feels hastily added and unsupported by the rest of the story.

Shahid Kapoor stars as Dev, Mumbai’s most notorious cop. I’m not sure how closely the new lead character hews to the one Prithviraj Sukumaran played in Mumbai Police, but Dev feels like he was pulled out of cold storage. He’s aggressively macho, breaks all the rules, yet is best friends with two upright fellow officers: Rohan (Pavail Gulati) and Farhan (Pravesh Rana), who’s also Dev’s brother-in-law.

The film opens with Dev getting in a motorcycle accident as he’s leaving a voicemail message for Farhan saying that he’s solved a notable murder case. The accident leaves Dev with amnesia, but Farhan chooses to keep that a secret. Dev’s the best cop there is, and Farhan trusts that Dev’s instincts will help him solve the case again, even if he’s starting from scratch.

The action flashes back to before the accident, as chain-smoking Dev roams about Mumbai smashing the heads of informants and drawing his gun on whomever he pleases. As long as Dev wears civilian attire when doing so, none of his superiors seem to care. It’s useful to have someone who doesn’t care about the rule of law to enforce the rules on others.

While the film gives a few nods to police brutality being undemocratic, it still celebrates its use. Dev always looks cool while beating the crap out of people, and the film’s action scenes are quite entertaining. But there’s something grim about Dev telling a crime boss, “Mumbai isn’t anyone’s kingdom. Mumbai belongs to the Mumbai police.” Not the citizens — the police.

Before Dev is able to confront the boss face to face, the police are repeatedly thwarted in the efforts to find him by a mole in their midst. Journalist Diya (Pooja Hegde) is eager to expose the mole’s identity. She takes his subterfuge personally, as her police constable father is injured in the effort to nab the boss. Her dad’s injury brings Diya and Dev closer together, and soon they are in love.

The intensity that Kapoor brings to his portrayal of Dev is one of the main reasons this movie works at all. He’s the right actor for the job, but there’s not much to Dev that we haven’t seen in other maverick cop characters before. Andrrews doesn’t provide us with any real critique of violent policing or aggressive masculinity, so the whole film feels a bit stale.

If there’s any revelation to be found in Deva, it’s the evocative, nuanced score from composer Jakes Bejoy. His only Hindi credit prior to this was 2020’s Durgamati. Here’s hoping that other Hindi filmmakers realize this composer’s potential to elevate even tired material.

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Movie Review: Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (2024)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Bade Miyan Chote Miyan on Netflix

Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (“Big Master Little Master“) finds the right tone for this comic action movie with some wacky twists. Despite this being one of the costliest Hindi movies to date, director Ali Abbas Zafar makes a few errors in the allocation of his substantial effects budget.

The film’s opening chase sequence is its weakest part. A convoy of Indian military trucks transports a vital piece of defense technology through hilly terrain. A masked villain — later revealed to be mad scientist Kabir (Prithviraj Sukumaran) — unleashes his own army to steal the asset.

Between the rapid-fire cuts and shaky cameras mounted on fast-moving vehicles, the sequence is hard to watch without feeling ill. Zafar has worked with both cinematographer Marcin Laskawiec and editor Steven H. Bernard before, so I’m not sure why this chase is as nauseating as it is.

With the future of India at stake, Colonel Azad (Ronit Roy) recalls two dishonorably discharged soldiers to help Captain Misha (Manushi Chhillar) retrieve what was stolen. Captain Rocky (Tiger Shroff) is quick to agree, but Captain Freddie (Akshay Kumar) turns Misha down — though only so that he can make a heroic entrance when the time is right.

In order to break into the secret vault where the stolen property is being held, Misha brings in IT wiz Dr. Pam (Alaya F) to help. Other than some mild banter between Rocky and Freddie, the tone of the film has been pretty straightforward to this point. That changes with the arrival of goofball Pam, who swoons at the sight of Rocky and promises to protect him, lest she be single again.

From here on, things get silly, but in a good way. The twists thrown at good guys are amusing, with some enjoyable payoffs in later action scenes. I’m a sucker for nonsense science talk in films, and Bade Miyan Chote Miyan has plenty of that. There’s also a lot of time spent changing computer passwords and typing in new ones, which tickled me for some reason.

Action sequences get much better after the early botched chase scene, with the quality increasing as the physical space allotted to them decreases. Shroff and Kumar are both good stunt actors, and they’re especially good in close-quarters fight scenes.

As bombastic as the action in Bade Miyan Chote Miyan is — fans of explosions: you’re in luck — there are occasional lapses of attention to detail. A sequence in which Rocky and Freddie infiltrate a terrorist base in Afghanistan is the worst example of this. A rocket hits a tent, and instead of a stunt actor several meters away being set on fire as a result of the explosion, he and the tent catch fire at the same time. When our heroes throw a grenade under a pursuing truck, the truck is already flipping before the bomb explodes.

There’s also a weird bit of narrative discontinuity in the videos for the songs that play over the closing credits. In the film, Sonakshi Sinha plays Freddie’s former fiancée, and it’s open-ended as to what their reunion means. Yet Freddie romances Misha in the two closing credits songs, despite him showing no interest in her during the film and her only remarking once that his gray hair suits him. It’s bizarre.

That said, there’s nothing so wrong with Bade Miyan Chote Miyan as to seriously detract from the enjoyment of it. Punches are thrown, stuff blows up, and Alaya F is strangely charming as the nutty professor. That’s enough for me.

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