Member Reviews

There’s a moment late in Despatch when Manoj Bajpayee looks, suddenly and disconcertingly, like his character from Kaun? (1999). It made me think of the giddy fun of that turn, driving Urmila Matondkar half-crazy with those nagging ma’ams. It also made me wonder—despite the obvious differences—what this film might have been like with that Bajpayee performance. Bajpayee once played heels with obvious relish, whereas his character in Despatch is wrapped in disgust and disdain, a bitter pill to spend two hours with.

Despatch starts off as a journalist story. It’s 2012. Joy Bag (Manoj Bajpayee) is a veteran crime reporter for a Mumbai-based newspaper. Joy is in a joyless marriage with Shweta (Shahana Goswami), and he plans a future with Prerna (Arrchita Agarwaal), a colleague he’s been having an affair with; he is in search of his next big headline.

A watch of Despatch, especially in its penultimate moments, sent me straight to Google in search of some facts and figures. That, in turn, led me down a rabbit hole where I was bombarded with one astounding (‘uncomfortable’ would be more apt) revelation after another. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s UNESCO Observatory of Killed Journalists, more than 1,600 journalists have been killed since 1993. Earlier this year, UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay broke it down bluntly, stating that in 85 per cent of such killings, the perpetrator has gone unpunished.

I couldn’t help but be left with the feeling that there’s an enjoyable disaster film somewhere within Rahul Dholakia’s Agni, which surely owes a debt to The Burning Train (1980). There is more than one echo of the Ravi Chopra-directorial, where the spectacle is foregrounded by professional rivalry – Danny Denzongpa and Vinod Khanna’s in the 1980 film; emulated by Pratik Gandhi and Divyenndu’s characters in Dholakia’s directorial. The innate Bollywood melodrama after an unexpected death, the high-voltage social commentary and righteous anger fuel both spectacles. Both Chopra and Dholakia’s film balance a strong ensemble, offering everyone their moment, and yet Dholakia’s film fails to stick its landing. It might have to do with what Hindi films have become in 2024 – too self-conscious, cautious, and reverential towards any uniform.

There is an early scene in Singham Again where Ajay Devgn’s titular super-cop barges into his teenage son’s party along with a couple of cronies, embarrasses him in public, and hauls him back home. He does it, it seems, only to give director Rohit Shetty another opportunity to shoot him in stylised slow-motion. At home, Singham and his wife, Avni (Kareena Kapoor Khan) lecture their son about how out of touch he is with Indian values. It’s a deeply melodramatic moment; you can almost imagine them turning into Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini from Baghban in a couple of decades. But one thing is made absolutely clear by this early domestic drama: Shetty and Devgn don’t think too highly of the nation’s youth. This became a recurring theme even in their pre-release press interviews. They would both proudly declare that they barely resonate with the kids these days, and how, back in their day, they were roughing it out in the real world. This is a bizarre stance to take, for multiple reasons. For one, it’s always a good idea to understand younger generations. You might just learn something; just ask Javed Akhtar. But second, Singham Again is aimed at the very demographic that Shetty and Devgn have decided to infantilise.

The Indian spin-off of Prime Video’s American show Citadel, titled Honey Bunny, tracks the making of super-agent Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra). Though Priyanka is not in the series, it’s about her parents Honey (Samantha) and Bunny (Varun Dhawan) and they become Citadel agents. The little Nadia (Kashvi) is very much present throughout the series and shows early inclinations of being a tough girl. While Honey is a struggling actor, Bunny is a stuntman who lives a double life of an agent under Baba (Kay Kay Menon). The time period is somewhere around 1992 and the play areas are Mumbai, Belgrade, Nainital and Bucharest. As expected, Baba and his ace killer KD (Saqib Saleem) are after Honey’s life even after eight years in 2000, but as the sentiments would go, Bunny returns to be the wall between death and life.

Rohit Shetty is probably the biggest showman in Bollywood right now. With Singham Again and the idea of a cop universe, he has pulled off the biggest mainstream casting in the last 25 years. With at least five top commercially viable actors—Ajay, Akshay, Ranveer, Deepika and Kareena—he has made the canvas of Singham Again so big that it is most likely to become the ‘go to’ movie of this year.

For psychological thrillers, it’s a given that we live in a broken world, a place with predators lurking around. Usually isolated from civilisation, literally and metaphorically, such a space evokes fear, horror and then survivalist tendencies. A new Netflix film Don’t Move portrays a similar canvas where a 30-something Iris (Kelsey), grieving the accidental death of her child, has lost the will to live, but she surprises herself with the fightback she still has in her when a family man-cum-ruthless kidnapper Richard (Finn) enters the scene.

There are twin sisters—Saumya and Shelly—played by Kriti Sanon in a beautiful Uttarakhand town with paragliders covering the blue sky. What a sense of relief in this confusing weather. Defused lighting and a lot of touch ups to bring out the best facial features of good-looking leads ensure a soothing start of a tale which harps on the childhood animosity of the twins. They both have their eyes set on a baby-faced yet quite violent Dhruv Sood (Shaheer Sheikh), which eventually leads to a cop and criminal chase led by Vidya Jyoti aka VJ (Kajol) to a point where the real purpose of law books and its practical usage would be discussed.

I watched emerging filmmaker Shishir Jha’s festival hit Tortoise Under The Earth (Dharti Latar Re Horo) a couple of months ago in Goa. Thanks to other tasks at hand, I willingly gave the film enough time to settle down in my memory, in such a way that I could reminiscence about it, preferably laden with nostalgia. I mean, what better way can be there to acknowledge a talented young filmmaker! Not even watching the trailer of the film to remind myself of the film’s exact plot was a conscious decision, something that could impact the original perspective I might have formed the first time. If certain visuals and sounds stay with me for all these weeks, rather months, then it’s probably going to have a similar effect on others as well.