Bloated, scattered addition to the Cop universe

New Delhi:

Singham? Oh no, not again. Yes, so annoying Again Singham, Unless you’re a diehard fan of the empty and sustained bombast these potboilers ride on, Rohit Shetty’s latest bloated, overheated and scattered addition to his Cop Universe.

Singham’s roar is still loud enough. The deafening background score doesn’t let the noise drop a single decibel point. But the impact, no matter how shrill and incisive the action becomes, wanes and cries out for a drastic reinvention.

That’s the lazy movie with the lowest common denominator Singham again resorts to sucks the power out of the police action thriller and leaves him gasping for breath – and for real inspiration. The film combines scenes from mythology – a narrator connects one episode to another – and serves as a parallel to the events taking place in the present day. The connection they try to make between myth and reality is overly pompous.

When the tank is as alarmingly leaky as this and the game revolves around tricks that are well past their sell-by date, it is most convenient to fall back on Hindi cinema’s most important repository of ideas and characters: the Ramayan. But even the Lord cannot save Singham again. The arrows in the film’s quiver are blunt. Big time.

Ten years after Ajay Devgn’s boastful Deputy Commissioner of Police Bajirao Singham went after a make-believe godman’s evil empire Singham returnshe comes back in Singham again to wage a cross-border war against a terrorist, Danger Lanka alias Zubair Hafeez (Arjun Kapoor).

The evil man does not wage religious war. Instead, he is on a personal mission to avenge his father and uncles and free his grandfather Omar Hafeez (Jackie Shroff) from a maximum 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, an official of the Ministry of Culture who conceptualizes and executes a new-age version of the Ram Leela. Shouldn’t she be equipped to give the best she can? But no, that would defeat the purpose of the film. So she is projected as unhappy and vulnerable.

In this Ram-Sita-Ravana redux, the action hero dons the musty garb of a savior-crusader to right the wrongs committed by a corrupt villain initially mistaken for a drug lord. One massacre and a kidnapping later, Singham realizes he is dealing with a vicious psychopath.

It could be easier to find a needle in a haystack than any semblance of novelty in the plot that the maximalist police drama conveys. The weaving of Ramayan references into a rough and ready good-versus-evil construct is neither intriguing as an idea nor particularly heavy-handed as a plot device, marred by a persistently banal approach to familiar conventions.

Since there is not much originality in the screenplay written by six writers (including director Rohit Shetty), Singham again turns to a phalanx of police officers and a lawmaker (Deepika Padukone, who makes a promising entry into a male-dominated universe, but doesn’t get a single chance to put her fellow male actors on stage) for support.

When Devgn went into ballistic franchise-defining ‘aata majhi satakli’ mode in 2011 Singham, the protagonist was almost a decade and a half younger. The great acts of bravery and daring he performed were in keeping with director Shetty’s vision of an invincible police officer who was so resolutely loyal to his job that he knew no fear.

The man is now older and a role model for peers and young people 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 maintained with varying degrees of success. in three other films of the franchise (Singham returns, Simba And Sooryavanshi). The appeal of Shetty’s ‘action design’ has worn thin.

This fifth installment of the Rohit Shetty Cop Universe franchise aims to portray everything with much greater flourish than ever before. But all the hypocritical pomposity turns out to be counterproductive.

Fans of the genre may be pleased by the overdose of bravado and rhetoric that comes from the storyline and creates room for cameos, not only by Simba And Sooryavanshi but also by Salman Khan’s Chulbul Pandey, a being from another realm and with a different sensibility (who pops up in a mid-credits scene to give a glimpse of what’s coming in this universe.

Bajirao Singham is obviously the sincere one, the one who can’t stop anyone when he loses his cool. He is Lord Ram. He is insurmountable. The male officers around him all develop stereotypical traits. DCP Veer Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar), a modern-day personification of Garuda who arrives hanging from a helicopter, is serious but gets confused with names.

ACP Sangram Bhalerao aka Simmba (Ranveer Singh) is a slang-spewing, wisecracking Monkey God from Mumbai who enjoys jumping into tight spots while grinning from ear to ear. And ACP Satya Bali (Tiger Shroff) is the young studious Lakshman who is always willing to learn at the feet of the former master who now has three films to his name.

The actors, led by Ajay Devgn who tread tried and tested territory, do their part, Ranveer Singh a little more than the others. But even if all the bits are added together, the payoff is minuscule. The problem is that they are not obliged to take action. They strut around like models on a catwalk, delivering stuffy lines about duty and morality or trying 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 it Singham again that would make the audience enthusiastic to sing “encore” in unison.

Deepika Padukone’s character – whatever I learned, I learned from you, she tells Bajirao Singham more than once – definitely deserves an entire film to herself. That could give Rohit Shetty’s Cop Universe a shot in the arm.

As far as Singham himself is concerned, any outing would be one too many. The crackers in this one are all noise and no nous. Did anyone expect anything different?