Bloated, Scattershot Addition To Cop Universe

Singham? Oh no, not again. Yes, that is how exasperating Singham Again, Rohit Shetty’s latest bloated, overheated and scattershot addition to his Cop Universe, is unless you happen to be a diehard fan of the vacuous and persistent bombast that these potboilers ride on.

Singham’s roar is still loud enough. The deafening background score does not let the din decline a single decibel point. But the impact, no matter how shrill and insistent the action gets, is on the wane and crying out for a drastic reinvention.

The lazy, lowest common denominator filmmaking that Singham Again resorts to sucks the power out of the police action thriller and leaves it gasping for breath – and genuine inspiration. The film throws in scenes from mythology – a narrator links one episode to another – to serve as parallels to the events unfolding in present times. The connection sought to be forged between myth and reality is overly stilted.

When the tank is as alarmingly leaky as this and the game hinges on tricks that are well past their sell-by dates, it is the most convenient thing to fall back on Hindi cinema’s go-to storehouse of ideas and characters – the Ramayan. But even the Lord cannot salvage Singham Again. The arrows in the film’s quiver are blunt. Big time.

A decade after Ajay Devgn’s swaggering Deputy Commissioner of Police Bajirao Singham went after the evil empire of a sham godman in Singham Returns, he returns again in Singham Again to wage a cross-border war against a terrorist, Danger Lanka alias Zubair Hafeez (Arjun Kapoor).

The evil man isn’t waging a religious war. He is instead on a personal mission to avenge his father and uncles and free his grandfather Omar Hafeez (Jackie Shroff) from a high-security Indian prison. He decides to use Singham’s wife Avni (Kareena Kapoor Khan) as a bargaining chip.

It is another matter that the lady is a woman of substance, a culture ministry official who conceptualises and executes a new-age version of the Ram Leela. Shouldn’t she be equipped to give as good as she gets? But no, that would defeat the very purpose of the film. So, she is projected as hapless and vulnerable.

In this Ram-Sita-Ravana redux, the action hero dons the stale garb of a saviour-crusader out to right the wrongs perpetrated by a venal villain who is initially taken for a mere drug lord. A massacre and a kidnap later, Singham realises that he is dealing with a vicious psychopath.

It might more easily locate a needle in a haystack than find any semblance of novelty in the plot that the maximalist cop drama peddles. The weaving of Ramayan references into a rough and ready good-versus-evil construct, besides being neither intriguing as an idea nor particularly heft-generating as a plot device, is marred by a doggedly trite approach to familiar conventions.

Because there isn’t much by way originality in the screenplay authored by six writers (including director Rohit Shetty), Singham Again ropes in a phalanx of lawmen and a lawwoman (Deepika Padukone, who makes a promising entry into a male-dominated universe but isn’t granted any opportunity to upstage her male co-actors) for support.

When Devgn slipped into the ballistic franchise-defining “aata majhi satakli” mode in 2011’s Singham, the lead actor was nearly a decade and a half younger. The grand acts of valour and daredevilry that he performed were in sync with director Shetty’s vision of an invincible police officer so single-mindedly wedded to his job that he knew no fear.

The man is now older and a role model to peers and juniors alike, but the courageous cop still has jeeps, off-roaders and buildings going up in flames around him – the trademark of the directorial style that has been sustained with varying degrees of success in three other films of the franchise (Singham Returns, Simmba and Sooryavanshi). The appeal of Shetty’s “action design” has worn thin.

In this the fifth instalment of the Rohit Shetty Cop Universe franchise, everything is sought to be rendered with much greater flourish than ever before. But all the sanctimonious pomposity proves counter-productive.

Fans of the genre might be pleased by the overdose of bravado and rhetoric that flow out of the storyline and create room for cameos not just by Simmba and Sooryavanshi but also by Salman Khan’s Chulbul Pandey, creature of a different realm and sensibility (who pops up in a mid-credits scene to provide a glimpse of what might be on the way in this universe.

Bajirao Singham is, of course, the upright one, the one that nobody can stop when he loses his cool. He is Lord Ram. He is insuperable. The male cops around him are each given stereotypical traits. DCP Veer Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar), a present-day personification of Garuda who arrives hanging from a chopper, is earnest to a fault but gets into a tangle with names.

ACP Sangram Bhalerao alia Simmba (Ranveer Singh) is a Mumbai street lingo-spouting, wisecracking Monkey God who revels in jumping into tight spots grinning from ear to ear. And ACP Satya Bali (Tiger Shroff) is the young eager-beaver Lakshman always willing to learn at the feet of the past master who now has three films to his name.

The actors, led by Ajay Devgn treading tried and tested terrain, do their bit, Ranveer Singh a little more than the others. However, even when all the bits are added up, the payoff is minuscule. The trouble is they aren’t required to act. They either strut about like models on a catwalk, deliver stuffy lines about duty and morality or attempt to provide comic relief.

By far the brightest spark in Singham Again is Ranveer Singh. With his constant chatter, he is indeed funny for the most part. There is little else in Singham Again that would enthuse the audience to intone “encore” in unison.

Deepika Padukone’s character – whatever I have learnt I have learnt from you, she says more than once to Bajirao Singham – definitely deserves a whole film to herself. That might give Rohit Shetty’s Cop Universe a shot in the arm.

As for Singham himself, another outing would be one too many. The crackers in this one are all noise and no nous. Did anyone expect anything different?