Nearly 25 years after uprooting a handpump in a fit of rage in Gadar and over three decades since upselling the power of his dhai kilo ka haath, Sunny Deol, now 67 years old, revels in ripping out (or apart) ceiling fans, banisters, columns, statues and other voluminous objects from their perches and sockets and wielding them as handy and deadly weapons.
While the veteran actor still looks the part and struts around with the requisite panache in Jaat, the rough-and-ready tropes that once worked famously for him and his films no longer possess the sheen that can help deflect our attention from a patchy script riddled with holes the size of giant craters.
Jaat is much ado about a couple of uneaten idlis and an upset man in quest of an apology until bigger issues – the discovery of thorium in coastal Andhra Pradesh, the displacement of villagers who have lived there for centuries, and the corruption of politicians and policemen all too willing to play into the hands of international conspirators.
The plot of director and co-writer Gopichand Malineni’s first Hindi film flits from a forest in Jaffna at the end of the Sri Lankan civil war to a cluster of coastal villages in southeastern India systematically emptied out of its residents a decade and a half on, and from (presumably) the World Economic Forum in Davos (where a dangerous geopolitical plot is hatched) to a high-security prison in Dhaka (the site of a bloody brawl that contributes to the creation of the myth of the unstoppable eponymous Jaat).
A ruthless man, Ranatunga (Randeep Hooda), with the aid of his goons, terrorizes a region into total submission. Villagers are killed at will. Their relatives are too scared to speak up. His wife, Bharathi (Regina Cassandra, wasted in a wishy-washy role), his amma (Swaroopa Ghosh) and his younger brother Somulu (Vineet Kumar Singh) aid him in his criminal enterprise.
When all seems lost, a mystery man surfaces from nowhere – if an Ayodhya Special train carrying hundreds of singing and dancing saffron-clad devotees of Lord Rama can be described as nowhere – and proceeds to set things right in the hamlet where a police sub-inspector Vijaya Lakshmi (Saiyami Kher) stumbles upon ten decapitated bodies. She decides to do something about it.
The men in the police party beat a hasty retreat. None of them has the courage to confront Ranatunga. But the policewomen, Vijaya Lakshmi and six others, decide to go bell the cat. But no, this situation isn’t about strong women doing what is right – conquering their fears and performing their duty.
It is eventually about underlining their vulnerabilities on account of their gender. No matter how brave they may seem at first flush, they cannot eventually do without the intervention of a male saviour. We know who it is going to be. The stranger on the prowl is a man on a mission.
Malineni’s unlikely partnership with Sunny Deol yields a messy, massy thriller that rides untrammeled on a series of interminable and gory set pieces. Will Jaat yield the expected commercial returns? We can only wait and watch.
Two weeks ago, another project helmed by a super-successful South Indian director and starring an ageing Mumbai megastar came a cropper at the box-office because the film reeked of obsolescence. Jaat is no different. Amid all the choreographed violence that it mounts, it is unable to make its way out of its cliched course.
The filmmaker and the villain that he rustles up, a modern-day Ravana who has fled his home country with his brother, two mates and a chest full of gold bars, are obsessed with beheadings. The film has a couple of scenes that project the evil Ranatunga as a monster with ten heads but he thinks nothing of chopping off human heads.
The mythological parallels that Jaat constructs, apart from being excruciatingly hackneyed, are crushingly tiresome. Why must every good versus evil tale told by a Hindi film be about Rama and Ravana?
The protagonist who arrives unheralded goes without a name for almost the entire length of the film. Just before the intermission, he lets on that he is a jaat. And it isn’t until the pre-climactic sequences that the audience is told who the man really is. By that point of the film, he has done his number and little left to the imagination.
One character (Upendra Limaye in a cameo) narrates a tale that reveals what the hero is capable of when he is provoked. A little later, another character, an Army Signals officer (Murali Sharma in a special appearance), tells us why the man is as dreaded as he is. Not that the audience needs any help to figure out the devastation that he can cause when the bad guys get in his way.
Running parallel to the stranger’s progress through the deserted villages is the mission of CBI officer Sathyamurthy (Jagapathi Babu). By the end of the film, the two operations overlap so that an all-out assault can be launched on the Lanka that Ranatunga has created.
For the titular character, the journey starts with a train ride. It is abruptly interrupted. He is stranded and hungry but never helpless. He goes looking for a plate of daal-roti. An elderly woman who runs an eatery in the wilderness offers him idlis instead. Things do not turn out well from that point on for a bunch of goons who get in the jaat’s crosshairs. The dhai kilo ka haath is inevitably invoked. The rest is total mayhem.
One thing leads to another and our man, livid and seeking nothing more than an innocuous “I am sorry” from those that prevented him from completing his repast, goes on a rampage. He shows up at the abode of the guy responsible for the misery of the villagers.
One protracted confrontation between the hero and the villain brings the first half to an end. The next big clash – the final one – takes its own sweet time to arrive. Along the way, the jaat who is without a name until this point, into a police station where the corrupt cops have hell to pay.
Unless you are an inveterate Sunny Deol fan, Jaat would be best avoided. But even if you are, the egregious violence and the monotonous plotting might prove to be impediments. The film has the rhythm of a bulldozer (that is the moniker the combative hero earns) – it is overly noisy and drably lumbering.
